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UP 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



LIFE OF 

Oliver Wendell Holmes 



BY 

E. E. BROWN 

Author of " Life of Garfield," " Life of Washington, 
"From Night to Light," etc., etc. 






* zJ 



BOSTON 
LOTHROP PUBLISHING COMPANY 



>> 






r 
-f6 



Copyright, 188-i, 

BY 
D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY. 






Copyright, 1894, 

BY 

Lothrop Publishing Cojipany 



t 



CONTENTS. 



Chap. 




Page. 


I. 


Ancestry . 


• 9 


II. 


Boyhood .... 


20 


III. 


Early Recollections 


. 30 


IV. 


Other Reminiscences 


. 40 


V. 


Abroad .... 


. 49 


VI. 


Change in the Home 


. 60 


VII. 


The Professor . 


. . 67 


VIII. 


The Lecturer . 




IX. 


Naming the new Magazine 


■ • *3 


X. 


Elsie Venner 


. 92 


XL 


Further Acquaintance 


107 


XII. 


Favorites of Song 


114 


XIII. 


The Man of Science. 


. . 136 


XIV. 


The Holmes Breakfast 


. 152 


XV. 


Orations and Essays . 


. 171 


XVI. 


The Home Circle 




XVII. 


Love of Nature. . . . 


. 227 


XVIII. 


The Harvard Medical School 


. 240 


XIX. 


Tokens of Esteem 


. 284 


XX. 


In Later Years . 


. 302 


XXI. 


Last Days . 


. 320 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER I. 



ANCESTRY. 



IN a quaint old gambrel-roofed house that 
once stood on Cambridge Common, Oliver 
Wendell Holmes — poet, professor, "beloved 
physician" — was born, on the twenty-ninth of 
August, 1809. His -father, the Rev. Abiel 
Holmes, was the pastor of the " First Church " 
in Cambridge — 

That ancient church whose lofty tower, 

Beneath the loftier spire, 
Is shadowed when the sunset hour 

Clothes the tall shaft in fire. 

Here, in Revolutionary times, General Wash- 
ington frequently worshipped, and the old home- 
stead itself was the headquarters of the Ameri- 
can army during the siege of Boston. 

9 



10 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

"It was a great happiness," writes the Poet 
at the Breakfast-Table, "to have been born in 
an old house haunted by such recollections, 
with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with 
fields of waving grass and trees and singing 
birds, and that vast territory of four or five 
acres around it, to give a child the sense that 
he was born to a noble principality. . . . 

" The gambrel-roofed house was not one of 
those old Tory, Episcopal church-goer's strong- 
holds. One of its doors opens directly upon 
the Green, always called the Common ; the 
other faces the south, a few steps from it, 
over a paved foot-walk on the other side of 
which is the miniature front yard, bordered 
with lilacs and syringas. 

"The honest mansion makes no pretensions 
Accessible, companionable, holding its hand out 
to all — comfortable, respectable, and even in its 
way dignified, but not imposing ; not a house 
for his Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Rev- 
erend successor of Him who had not where 
to lay his head, for something like a hundred 
and fifty years it has stood in its lot, and 
seen the generations of men come and go like 
the leaves of the forest." 



ANCESTRY. 11 

The house was not originally built for a par- 
sonage. "It was first the residence of a well- 
to-do tailor, who sold it to Jonathan Hastings, 
a prosperous farmer whom the college students 
used to call "Yankee Jont," and whose son 
was the college steward in 1775. It was long 
known in Cambridge as the " Hastings House," 
but about the year 1792 it was sold to Elipha- 
let Pearson, the Hebrew Professor at Harvard, 
and in 1807 it passed into the hands of the 
Rev. Abiel Holmes. 

For forty years the father of Oliver Wen- 
dell Holmes ministered to his Cambridge par- 
ish, revered and loved by all who knew him. 
He was a man of marked literary ability, as his 
Annals of America shows — "full of learning," 
as some one has said, " but never distressing 
others by "showing how learned he was." 

Said T. W. Higginson, at the Holmes Break- 
fast: 

" I should like to speak of that most delightful 
of sunny old men, the father of Doctor Holmes, 
whom I knew and loved when I was a child. 

. . I was brought up in Cambridge, my 
father's house being next door to that of Doctor 
Holmes' gambrel-roofed house, and the library 



12 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

I most enjoyed tumbling about in was the 
same in which his infant gambols had first 
disturbed the repose of the books. I shall 
always remember a certain winter evening, when 
we boys were playing before the fire, how the 
old man — gray, and gentle, and kindly as any 
old German professor, and never complaining 
of our loudest gambols — going to the frost- 
covered window, sketched with his pen-knife 
what seemed a cluster of brambles and a 
galaxy of glittering stars, and above that he 
wrote, Per aspera ad astra : ' Through difficul- 
ties to the stars.' He explained to us what it 
meant, and I have never forgotten that quiet win- 
ter evening and the sweet talk of that old man." 
The good pastor was a graduate of Yale 
College, and before coming to Cambridge had 
taught at his Alma Mater, and preached in 
Georgia. He was the son of Doctor David 
Holmes, a physician of Woodstock, Ct, who 
had served as captain in the French and Indian 
wars, and afterward as surgeon in the Revo- 
lutionary army. The grandfather of Doctor 
David Holmes was one of the original settlers 
of Woodstock. * 

*From notes furnished the writer by Dr. Holmes. 



ANCESTRY. 13 

The genealogy of the Holmes family of Wood- 
stock dates from Thomas Holmes, a lawyer of 
Gray's Inn, London. In 1686, John Holmes, 
one of his descendants, joined a colony from 
Roxbury, Mass., and settled in Woodstock, Conn. 
His son David married a certain " Bathsheba," 
who had a remarkable reputation as nurse and 
doctress. 

In the great storm of 17 17, when the settlers' 
houses were almost buried in the snow, it is 
said that she climbed out of an upper-story 
window and travelled on snow-shoes through 
almost impassable drifts to Dudley, Mass., to 
visit a sick woman. The son of this noble 
Bathsheba was " Dr. David," the grandfather of 
Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

In 1790, Abiel Holmes was married to the 
daughter of President Stiles of Yale, who died 
without children. His second wife, and the 
mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a daugh- 
ter of Hon. Oliver Wendell, an eminent law- 
yer. He was descended from various Wendells, 
Olivers, yuinceys, and Bradstreets — names 
that belonged to the best blue blood of New 
England — and his wife was Mary Jackson, a 
daughter of Dorothy Quincy, the " Dorothv 



14 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Q." whom Doctor Holmes has immortalized in 
his poem. And just here, lest some of my 
readers may have forgotten some parts of this 
delicious bit of family portraiture, I am tempted 
to give the entire poem : 

Grandmother's mother, her age I guess, 
Thirteen summers or something less ; 
Girlish bust, but womanly air, 
Smooth square forehead, with uprolled hair, 
Lips that lover has never kissed, 
Taper ringers and slender wrist, 
Hanging sleeves of stiff brocade — 
So they painted the little maid. 

On her hand a parrot green 

Sits unmoving and broods serene ; 

Hold up the canvas full in view — 

Look, there's a rent the light shines through. 

Dark with a century's jringe of dust, 

That was a Redcoat's rapier thrust ! 

Such is the tale the lady old, 

Dorothy's daughter's daughter told. 

Who the painter was none may tell — 
One whose best was not over well ; 
Hard and dry, it must be confessed, 
Flat as a rose that has long been pressed ; 
Yet in her cheek the hues are bright, 
Dainty colors of red and white ; 
And in her slender shape are seen 
Hint and promise of stately mien. 



ANCESTRY. 15 



Look not on her with eyes of scorn — 
Dorothy Q. was a lady born ! 
Ay, since the galloping Normans came, 
England's annals have known her name ; 
And still to the three-hilled rebel town 
Dear is that ancient name's renown, 
For many a civic wreath they won, 
The youthful sire and the gray-haired son. 

O damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q., 
Strange is the gift that I owe to you ; 
Such a gift as never a king 
Save to daughter or son might bring — 
All my tenure of heart and hand, 
All my title to house and land; 
Mother and sister, and child and wife, 
And joy and sorrow, and death and life. 

What if a hundred years ago 

Those close-shut lips had answered, no, 

When forth the tremulous question came 

That cost the maiden her Norman name ; 

And under the folds that look so still 

The bodice swelled with the bosom's thrill 

Should I be I, or would it be 

One tenth another to nine tenths me? 

Soft is the breath of a maiden's yes; 
Not the light gossamer stirs with less; 
But never a cable that holds so fast, 
Through all the battles of wave and blast, 
And never an echo of speech or song 
That lives in the babbling air so long ! 



16 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 

There were tones in the voice that whispered then 
You may hear to-day in a hundred men, 

lady and lover, how faint and far 
Your images hover, and here we are, 
Solid and stirring in flesh and bone, 
Edward's and Dorothy's — all their own — 
A goodly record for time to show 

Of a syllable spoken so long ago! 
Shall I bless you, Dorothy, or forgive, 
For the tender whisper that bade me live ? 

It shall be a blessing, my little maid, 

1 will heal the stab of the Redcoat's blade, 
And freshen the gold of the tarnished frame, 
And gild with a rhyme your household name, 
So you shall smile on us, brave and bright, 
As first you greeted the morning's light, 

And live untroubled by woes and fears, 
Through a second youth of a hundred years. 

This Dorothy Quincy, it is interesting to 
note, was the aunt of a second Dorothy 
Quincy, who married Governor Hancock. The 
Wendells were of Dutch descent. 

Evert Jansen Wendell, who came from East 
Friesland in 1645, was the original settler in Al- 
bany. From the church records, we find that 
he was the Regerendo Dijaken in 1656, and 
upon one ot the windows of the old Dutch church 



ANCESTRY. 17 

in Albany, the arms of the Wendells — a ship 
riding at two anchors — were represented in 
stained glass. Very little is known of these early 
ancestors, but the name is still an influential 
one among the old Knickerbocker families. 

Early in the eighteenth century, Abraham 
and Jacob Wendell left their Albany home and 
came to Boston. It is said that Jacob (the 
great-grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes) fell 
in love with his future wife, the daughter of 
Doctor James Oliver, when she was only nine 
years of age. Seeing her at play, he was so 
impressed by her beauty and grace that, like 
the Jacob of old, he willingly waited the flight 
of years. Twelve children blessed this happy 
union, and the youngest daughter married Wil- 
liam Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and the 
father of Wendell Phillips. 

Fair cousin, Wendell P., 

says Doctor Holmes in his Phi Beta Kappa 
poem of 1881 : 

Our ancestors were dwellers beside the Zuyder Zee ; 
Both Grotius and Erasmus were countrymen of we, 
And Vondel was our namesake, though he spelt it with a v. 



18 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Jacob Wendell became, eventually, one of the 
richest merchants of Boston ; was a member of 
the City Council and colonel of the Boston 
regiment. His son, Oliver (the grandfather of 
Doctor Holmes), was born in 1733, and after 
his graduation at Harvard, in 1753, he went 
into business with his father. He still continued 
his studies, however, and preferring a professional 
life to that of a business man, he afterwards 
graduated at the Law School, was admitted to 
the bar, and soon after appointed Judge of Pro- 
bate for Suffolk County. In Drake's Old Land- 
marks of Boston, we find that Judge Wendell 
was a selectman during the siege of Boston, and 
was commissioned by General Washington to 
raise a company of men to watch the British 
after the evacuation, so that no spies might pass 
between the two armies. 

The original Bradstreet was Simon, the old 
Charter Governor, who married Governor Dud- 
ley's daughter Anne* This accomplished lady, 
the first New England poetess, and frequently 

* In the Harvard College Library may be seen a copy of Anne Bradstreet's 
poems, which passed through eight editions. The extraordinary title of her 
world-renowned book reads as follows: "Several poems compiled with great 
variety of wit and learning, full of delight, wherein especially is contained a com- 
plete discourse and description of the four elements, constitutions, ages of man, 
seasons of the year, together with an exact epitome of the three first monarchies, 



ANCESTRY. 19 

called by her contemporaries " The Tenth Muse," 
was Doctor Holmes' grandmother's great-great- 
grandmother.* 

With such an ancestry, Oliver Wendell Holmes 
surely fulfils all the conditions of " a man of fam- 
ily," and who will not readily agree with the 
Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, when he writes 
as follows : 

" I go for the man with the family portraits 
against the one with the twenty-five cent 
daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is 
the better of the two. I go for the man that 
inherits family traditions and the cumulative 
humanities of at least four or five generations. 
Above all things, as a child, he should have 
tumbled about in a library. All men are afraid 
of books that have not handled them from 
infancy." 

viz., the Assyrian, Persian, Grecian, and beginning of the Roman Commonweal 
to the end of their last king : with diverse other pleasant and serious poems. By 
a gentlewoman in New England. This talented lady was the ancestress not 
only of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but also of the Channings, Danas and 
Phillipses. 
* From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. 



20 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER II. 



BOYHOOD. 



IN a curious little almanac for 1809 may 
still be seen against the date of August 
29, the simple record, " Son b." Twice before 
had good Parson Holmes recorded in similar 
manner the births of his children, for Oliver 
Wendell, who bore his grandfather's name, was 
his third child ; but this was the first time he 
could write " son." 

A few years later another son came — the 
" brother John " whose wit and talents have 
gladdened so many hearts — and, last of all, 
another daughter came to brighten the family 
circle for a few brief years. 

The little Oliver was a bright, sunny-tempered 
child, highly imaginative and extremely sensi- 
tive. Speaking of his childhood in after years, 
and of certain superstitious fancies that always 
clung to him, he says : 



BOYHOOD. 21 

" I tell you it was not so pleasant for a little 
boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in 
an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, 
locked upper chambers, and a most ghostly 
garret ; . . . There was a dark store-room. 
too, on looking through the keyhole of which 
I could dimly see a heap of chairs and tables 
and other four-footed things, which seemed to 
me to have rushed in there frightened, and in 
their fright to have huddled together and climbed 
up on each other's backs — as the people did 
in that awful crush where so many were killed 
at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty. 
Then the lady's portrait up-stairs with the sword- 
thrusts through it — marks of the British offi- 
cers' rapiers — and the tall mirror in which 
they used to look at their red coats — confound 
them for smashing its mate! — and the deep, 
cunningly-wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy 
used to sit while his hair was dressing ; he 
was a gentleman, and always had it covered 
with a large peignoir to save the silk covering 
my grandmother embroidered. Then the little 
room down-stairs from which went the orders 
to throw up a bank of earth on the hill yon- 
der where you may now observe a granite obe- 



22 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

lisk, the study in my father's time, but in those 
days the council-chamber of armed men, some- 
times filled with soldiers. Come with me, and 
I will show you the ' dents ' left by the butts 
of their muskets all over the floor. With all these 
suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild 
stories those awful country boys that came to live 
in our service brought with them — of contracts 
written in blood and left out over night not to 
be found the next morning (removed by the 
Evil One who takes his nightly round among 
our dwellings, and filed away for future use), 
of dreams coming true, of death-signs, of appa- 
ritions, no wonder that my imagination got ex- 
cited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies." 

What some of these fancies were, he tells 
us elsewhere : 

" I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never 
tell. The masts looked frightfully tall, but they 
were not so tall as the steeple of our old yel- 
low meeting-house. At any rate, I used to hide 
my eyes from the sloops and schooners that 
were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and 
I confess that traces of this undefined terror 
lasted very long. One other source of alarm 
had a still more fearful significance. There was 



BOYHOOD. 23 

a great wooden hand, a glovemaker's sign, which 
used to swing and creak in the blast as it hung 
from a pillar before a certain shop a mile or 
two outside of the city. Oh, the dreadful hand ! 
Always hanging there ready to catch up a little 
boy who would come home to supper no more, 
nor yet to bed, whose porringer would be laid 
away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes 
wait until his small brother grew to fit them. 

" As for all manner of superstitious observances, 
I used once to think I must have been pecul- 
iar in having such a list of them, but I 
now believe that half the children of the same 
age go through the same experiences. No 
Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue 
of omens as I found in the sibylline leaves of 
my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone 
at a tree and attaching some mighty issue to 
hitting or missing, which you will find men- 
tioned in one or more biographies, I well 
remember. Stepping on or over certain partic- 
ular things or spots — Doctor Johnson's special 
weakness — I got the habit of at a very early 
age. 

"With these follies mingled sweet delusions 
which I loved so well I would not outgrow 



24 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

them, even when it required a voluntary effort 
to put a momentary trust in them. Here is 
one which I cannot help telling you. 

" The firing of the great guns at the Navy 
Yard is easily heard at the place where I was 
born and lived. 'There is a ship of war come 
in,' they used to say, when they heard them. 
Of course I supposed that such vessels came 
in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of absence, 
suddenly as falling stones , and that the great 
guns roared in their astonishment and delight 
at the sight of the old war-ship splitting the 
bay with her cut-water. Now, the sloop-of-war 
the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously 
capturing the Reindeer and the Avon, had 
disappeared from the face of the ocean, and 
was supposed to be lost. But there was no 
proof of it, and of course for a time, hopes 
were entertained that she might be heard from. 
Long after the last real chance had utterly 
vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illu- 
sion that somewhere on the waste of waters 
she was still floating, and there were years 
during which I never heard the sound of the 
great guns booming inland from the Navy Yard 
without saying to myself, 'the Wasp has come!' 



BOYHOOD. 25 

and almost thinking I could see her as she 
rolled in, crumpling the waters before her, 
weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars 
and threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts 
and tears of thousands. This was one of those 
dreams that I mused and never told. Let 
me make a clean breast of it now, and say, 
that, so late as to have outgrown childhood, 
perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, 
when the roar of the cannon has struck 
suddenly on my ear, I have started with a 
thrill of vague expectation and tremulous 
delight, and the long unspoken words have artic- 
ulated themselves in the mind's dumb whisper, 
The Wasp has come ! 

" Yes ; children believe plenty of queer things. 
I suppose all of you have had the pocket-book 
fever when you were little ? What do I mean ? 
Why, ripping up old pocket-books in the firm 
belief that bank-bills to an immense amount 
were hidden in them. So, too, you must all 
remember some splendid unfulfilled promise of 
somebody or other, which fed you with hopes 
perhaps for years, and which left a blank in 
your life which nothing has ever filled up. 
0. T. quitted our household carrying with him 



26 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

the passionate regrets of the more youthful 
members. He was an ingenious youngster ; 
wrote wonderful copies, and carved the two 
initials given above with great skill on all 
available surfaces. I thought, by the way, they 
were all gone, but the other day I found them 
on a certain door. How it surprised me to 
find them so near the ground ! I had thought 
the boy of no trivial dimensions. Well, O. T., 
when he went, made a solemn promise to two 
of us. I was to have a ship, and the other 
a martin house (last syllable pronounced as in 
the word tin). Neither ever came ; but oh ! how 
many and many a time I have stolen to the 
corner — the cars pass close by it at this time 
— and looked up that long avenue, thinking 
that he must be coming now, almost sure as 
I turned to look northward that there he would 
be, trudging toward me, the ship in one hand 
and the rmxtin house in the other ! " 

At an early age the merry, restless little 
fellow was sent to a neighboring school, kept 
by Ma'am Prentiss, a good, motherly old dame, 
who ruled her little flock, not with a scourge 
of birches, but with a long willow rod that 
reached quite across the schoolroom, "remind- 



BOYHOOD. Ti 

ing,* rather than chastening." Among her pupils 
was Alfred Lee, afterwards the beloved Bishop 
of Delaware. 

"It is by little things," says the Autocrat, 
" that we know ourselves ; a soul would very 
probably mistake itself for another, when once 
disembodied, were it not for individual experi- 
ences which differ from those of others only in 
details seemingly trivial. All of us have been 
thirsty thousands of times, and felt with Pindar, 
that water was the best of things. I alone, 
as I think, of all mankind, remember one par- 
ticular pailful of water, flavored with the white- 
pine of which the pail was made, and the 
brown mug out of which one Edmund, a red- 
faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have 
bitten a fragment in his haste to drink ; it 
being then high summer, and little full-blooded 
boys feeling very warm and porous in the low 
studded schoolroom where Dame Prentiss, dead 
and gone, ruled over young children. Thirst 
belongs to humanity everywhere, in all ages, 
but that white-pine pail and that brown mug 
belong to me in particular." 

The next school to which the Cambridge pas- 

*From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. 



28 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

tor sent his little son was kept by William 
Biglow, a man of considerable scholarship and 
much native wit. Five years were spent at 
a school in Cambridgeport, which was kept 
by several successive teachers, and it was here, 
as schoolmates, that Oliver Wendell Holmes 
first met Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry 
Dana. 

" I was moderately studious," says Doctor 
Holmes, and very fond of reading stories, which 
I sometimes did in school hours. I was fond 
also of whispering, and my desk bore sad wit- 
ness to my passion for whittling. For these 
misdemeanors I sometimes had a visitation from 
the ferule, and once when a Gunter's scale 
was used for this purpose, it flew to pieces as 
it came down on my palm."* 

It was about this time, doubtless, that the 
Autocrat learned that important fact about the 
"hat." 

"I was once equipped," he says, "in a hat 
of Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider 
dimensions than were usual at that time, and 
sent to school in that portion of my native 
town which lies nearest to the metropolis. On 

•From notes furnished by Doctor Holmes. 



BOYHOOD. 29 

my way I was met by a ' Port- Chuck,' as we 
used to call the young gentlemen of that locality, 
and the following dialogue ensued : 

" The Port-Chuck: 'Hullo, you sir, joo know 
th' wus goin' to be a race to-morrah ? ' 

"Myself: 'No. Who's goin' to run, 'n' wher' 
's 't goin' to be ? ' 

" The Port-Chuck: 'Squire Mico 'n' Doctor 
Williams, round the brim o' your hat.' 

" These two much-respected gentlemen being 
the oldest inhabitants at that time, and the 
alleged race-course being out of the question, 
the Port-Chuck also winking and thrusting his 
tongue into his cheek, I perceived that I had 
been trifled with, and the effect has been to 
make me sensitive and observant respecting 
this article ever since. The hat is the vulner- 
able point of the artificial integument." 



30 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 



CHAPTER III. 



EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 



OF the boyhood of Doctor Holmes we have 
many delightful glimpses. 
" Like other boys in the country," he tells 
us, " I had my patch of ground to which in 
the springtime I intrusted the seeds furnished 
me with a confident trust in their resurrection 
and glorification in the better world of summer. 
But I soon found that my lines had fallen in 
a place where a vegetable growth had to run 
the gauntlet of as many foes and trials as a 
Christian pilgrim. Flowers would not blow ; 
daffodils perished like criminals in their con- 
demned caps, without their petals ever seeing 
daylight ; roses were disfigured with monstrous 
protrusions through their very centres, some- 
thing that looked like a second bud pushing 
through the middle of the corolla ; lettuces and 
cabbages would not head ; radishes knotted 



EARL Y RECOL LECTIONS. 31 

themselves until they looked like centenarians' 
fringes ; and on every stern, on every leaf, and 
both sides of it, and at the root of everything 
that grew, was a professional specialist in the 
shape of grub, caterpillar, aphis, or other expert, 
whose business it was to devour that particular 
part, and help murder the whole attempt at veg- 
etation. . . . Yet Nature is never wholly 
unkind. Economical as she was in my unpar- 
adised Eden, hard as it was to make some of 
my floral houris unveil, still the damask roses 
sweetened the June breezes, the bladed and 
plumed flower-de-luces unfolded their close-wrapped 
cones, and larkspurs, and lupins, lady's delights 
— plebeian manifestations of the pansy — self- 
sowing marigolds, hollyhocks ; the forest flowers 
ofi two seasons, and the perennial lilacs and 
syringas, all whispered to the winds blowing 
over them that some caressing presence was 
around me. 

"Beyond the garden was the field, a vast 
domain of four acres or thereabouts by the meas- 
urement of after years, bordered to the north 
by a fathomless chasm — the ditch the base-ball 
players of the present era jump over ; on the 
east by unexplored territory ; on the south by 



32 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

a barren enclosure, where the red sorrel pro- 
claimed liberty and equality under its drapeau 
rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable 
commune where all were alike, poor, mean, sour, 
and uninteresting ; and on the west by the Com- 
mon, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures 
which make it look like a cattle-market. 

" Beyond, as I looked round, were the col- 
leges, the meeting-house, the little square mar- 
ket-house, long vanished, the burial ground 
where the dead presidents stretched their weary 
bones under epitaphs stretched out at as full 
length as their subjects ; the pretty church 
where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their 
hassocks, the district schoolhouse, and hard by 
it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so called in 
those days, but rather ' ten-footer ' ; then 
houses scattered near and far, open spaces, the 
shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance, 
and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind 
you, this was the world, as I first knew it ; 
terra vetcribus cognita, as Mr. Arrowsmith would 
have called it, if he had mapped the universe 
of my infancy." 

" When I was of smallest dimensions," he 
says at another time, "and wont to ride impacted 



EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 33 

between the knees of fond parental pair, we 
would , sometimes cross the bridge to the next 
village town and stop opposite a low, brown, 
gambrel-roofed cottage. Out of it would come 
one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy 
herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and bending 
over her flower bed, would gather a 'posy,' 
as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies 
in the churchyard, with a slab of blue slate at 
her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little 
within the last few years. Cottage, garden-bed, 
posies, grenadier-like rows of seeding-onions — 
stateliest of vegetables — all are gone, but the 
breath of a marigold brings them all back to 
me." 

Of Cambridge at this time, James Russell 
Lowell, in his Fireside Travels, tells us : " It 
was still a country village with its own habits 
and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly the 
force of suburban gravitation. Approaching it 
from the west, by what was then called the 
New Road, you would pause on the brow of 
Symond's Hill to enjoy a view singularly sooth- 
ing and placid. In front of you lay the town, 
tufted with elms, lindens, and horse-chestnuts, 
which had seen Massachusetts a colony, and 



34 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

were fortunately unable to emigrate with the 
Tories by whom, or by whose fathers they were 
planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the 
College, the square, brown tower of the Epis- 
copal Church, and the slim yellow spire of the 
parish meeting-house. On your right the Charles 
slipped smoothly through green and purple salt 
meadows, darkened here and there with the 
blossoming black grass as with a stranded cloud- 
shadow. To your left upon the Old Road you 
saw some half-dozen dignified old houses of the 
colonial time, all comfortably fronting south- 
ward. . . . We called it ' the Village ' then, 
and it was essentially an English village — quiet, 
unspeculative, without enterprise, sufficing to 
itself, and only showing such differences from 
the original type as the public school and the 
system of town government might superinduce. 
A few houses, chiefly old, stood around the 
bare common, with ample elbow-room, and old 
women, capped and spectacled, still peered 
through the same windows from which they had 
watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by to 
Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the hand- 
some Virginia general who had come to wield 
our homespun Saxon chivalry. The hooks were 



EARL Y RECOLLECTIONS. 35 

to be seen from which had swung the ham- 
mocks of Burgoyne's captive red-coats. If mem- 
ory does not deceive me, women still washed 
clothes in the town spring, clear as that of 
Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the travel 
to the metropolis. Commencement had not 
ceased to be the great holiday of the Boston 
commonwealth, and a fitting one it was. The 
students (scholars they were called then) wore 
their sober uniform, not ostentatiously distinctive, 
or capable of rousing democratic envy ; and 
the old lines of caste were blurred rather than 
rubbed out, as servitor was softened into bene- 
ficiary. Was it possible for us in those days 
to conceive of a greater potentate than the 
president of the University, in his square doc- 
tor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and 
Cambridge ? " 

The father of Oliver Wendell Holmes was a 
Calvanist, not indeed of the severest east, but 
still strictly " orthodox " in all his religious 
views, and when Oliver, his elder son, was fif- 
teen years of age, he sent him to the Phillips 
Academy in Andover, thinking that the relig- 
ious atmosphere there was less heretical than 
at Phillips Academy, Exeter, where Arminian 



36 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

tendencies were just beginning to show them- 
selves. 

" I have some recollections of Andover, pleas- 
ant and other," says Doctor Holmes. " I won- 
der if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly 
as it used to. My room-mate thought, when 
he first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, 
and people's ages, as they do in the country. 
He swore (ministers' sons get so familiar with 
good words that they are apt to handle them 
carelessly), that the children were dying by the 
dozen of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran 
off next day in recess when it began to strike 
eleven, but was caught before the clock got 
through striking. At the foot of the hill, 
down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which 
was said to have been hooped with iron to pro- 
tect it from Indian tomahawks (Credab Hahnue- 
mannus), and to have grown round its hoops 
and buried them in its wood." 

The extreme conscientiousness of the boy is 
strikingly depicted in the following revelation : 

" The first unequivocal act of wrong that has 
left its trace in my memory was this : refusing 
a small favor asked of me — nothing more than 
telling what had happened at school one morn- 



EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 37 

ing. No matter who asked it ; but there were 
circumstances which saddened and awed me. I 
had no heart to speak ; I faltered some miser- 
able, perhaps petulant excuse, stole away, and 
the first battle of life was lost. 

" What remorse followed I need not tell. 
Then and there to the best of my knowledge, 
I first consciously took Sin by the hand and 
turned my back on Duty. Time has led me 
to look upon my offence more leniently ; I do 
not believe it or any other childish wrong is 
infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely 
finite. Yet, if I had but won that first battle ! " 

And what a charming picture he gives us 
of the peaceful, hallowing influences about him 
in that quiet old parsonage ! 

" The Puritan ' Sabbath,' as everybody knows, 
began at ' sundown ' on Saturday evening. To 
such observances of it I was born and bred. 
As the large, round disk of day declined, a 
stillness, a solemnity, a somewhat melancholy 
hush came over us all. It was time for work 
to cease, and for playthings to be put away. 
The world of active life passed into the shadow 
of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun 
should sink again beneath the horizon. 



38 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

" It was in the stillness of the world without 
and of the soul within that the pulsating lul- 
laby of the evening crickets used to make 
itself most distinctly heard — so that I well 
remember I used to think that the purring of 
these little creatures, which mingled with the 
batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamps, 
■was peculiar to Saturday evenings. I don't 
know that anything could give a clearer idea 
of the quieting and subduing effect of the old 
habit of observance of what was considered 
holy time, than this strange, childish fancy." 

Had all the clergymen who visited the par- 
sonage been as true to their profession as his 
own dear father, the thoughtful, impressible boy 
might, very possibly, have devoted his brilliant 
talents to the ministry. " It was a real delight," 
he says, "to have one of those good, hearty, 
happy, benignant old clergymen pass the Sunday 
with us, and I can remember one whose advent 
made the day feel almost like ' Thanksgiving. ' 
But now and then would come along a clerical 
visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice, 
which sounded exactly as if somebody must be 
lying dead up-stairs, who took no interest in 
us children, except a painful one, as being in a 



EARLY RECOLLECTIONS. 39 

bad way with our cheery looks, and did more 
to unchristianize us with his woebegone ways 
than all his sermons were like to accomplish in 
the other direction. I remember one in partic- 
ular who twitted me so with my blessings as 
a Christian child, and whined so to me about 
the naked black children, that he did more in 
that one day to make me a heathen than he 
had ever done in a month to make a Chris- 
tian out of an infant Hottentot. I might have 
been a minister myself for aught I know, if 
this clergyman had not looked and talked so 
like an undertaker." 

An exercise written while at Andover, shows at 
what an early age he attempted versification. It 
is a translation from the first book of Virgil's 
yEneid, and reads as smoothly as any lines of 
Pope. The following extract shows the angry god 
giving his orders to Zephyrus and Eurus : 

Is this your glory in a noble line, 

To leave your confines and to ravage mine ? 

Whom I — but let these troubled waves subside — 

Another tempest and I'll quell your pride ! 

Go bear our message to your master's ear, 

That wide as ocean I am despot here ; 

Let him sit monarch in his barren caves ! 

I wield the trident and control the waves. 



40 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER IV. 



OTHER REMINISCENCES. 



IN his vacations the inquiring mind of the 
young student had made " strange acquaint- 
ances " in a certain book infirmary up in the 
attic of the gambrel-roofed house. 

" The Negro Plot at New York!' he says, 
"helped to implant a feeling in me which it 
took Mr. Garrison a good many years to root 
out. Thinks I to myself, an old novel which 
has been attributed to a famous statesman, in- 
troduced me to a world of fiction which was 
not represented on the shelves of the library 
proper, unless perhaps by Caelcbs in search of 
a Wife, or allegories of the bitter tonic class" 

Then there was an old, old Latin alchemy 
book, with the manuscript annotations of some 
ancient Rosicrucian, "In the pages of which," he 
says, " I had a vague notion that I might find 
the mighty secret of the Lapis Philosophorum, 



OTHEB REMINISCENCES. 41 

otherwise called Chaos, the Dragon, the Green 
Lion, the Quinta Essentia, the Soap of Sages, 
the vinegar of Heavenly Grace, the Egg, the 
Old Man, the Sun, the Moon, and by all man- 
ner of odd aliases, as I am assured by the 
plethoric little book before me, in parchment 
covers browned like a meerschaum with the 
smoke of furnaces, and the thumbing of dead 
gold-seekers, and the fingering of bony-handed 
book-misers, and the long intervals of dusty 
slumber on the shelves of the bonquiniste." 

" I have never lost my taste for alchemy," 
he adds, " since I first got hold of the Palla- 
dium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought 
— in vain, it is true — through its pages for a 
clear, intelligible, and practical statement of how 
I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights 
of the tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold 
specific gravity, 19.2, and exchangeable for what- 
ever I then wanted, and for many more things 
than I was then aware of. 

" One of the greatest pleasures of childhood 
is found in the mysteries which it hides from 
the scepticism of the elders, and works up into 
small mythologies of its own. I have seen all 
this played over again in adult life, the same 



42 OLIVER W EX DELL HOLMES. 

delightful bewilderment of semi-emotional belief 
in listening to the gaseous promises of this or 
that fantastic system, that I found in the pleas- 
ing mirages conjured up for me by the ragged 
old volume I used to pore over in the south- 
east attic chamber." 

There are other reminiscences of these days 
that show us not only the outward surroundings, 
but the inner workings of the boy's mind. 

" The great Destroyer," he says, " had come 
near me, but never so as to be distinctly seen 
and remembered during my tender years. There 
flits dimly before me the image of a little girl 
whose name even I have forgotten, a schoolmate 
whom we missed one day, and were told that 
she had died. But what death was I never 
had any very distinct idea until one day I 
climbed the low stone-wall of the old burial 
ground and mingled with a group that were 
looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole, 
dug down through the green sod, down through 
the brown loam, down through the yellow gravel, 
and there at the bottom was an oblong red 
box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young 
man seen through an opening at one end of it. 

" When the lid was closed, and the gravel 



OTHER REIIUSTISCENCES. 43 

and stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman 
in black who was crying and wringing her 
hands went off with the other mourners, and 
left him, then I felt that I had seen Death, 
and should never forget him." 

There were certain sounds too, he tells us, 
that had " a mysterious suggestiveness " to him. 
One was the " creaking of the woodsleds, bring- 
ing their loads of oak and walnut from the 
country, as the slow-swinging oxen trailed them 
along over the complaining snow in the cold, 
brown light of early morning. Lying in bed 
and listening to their dreary music had a 
pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or 
that which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed 
in looking on at a battle by one 'who hath 
no friend, no brother there.' 

" Yes, and there was still another sound 
which mingled its solemn cadences with the 
waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. 
It was heard only at times, a deep, muffled 
roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast ; 
a whistling boy would have drowned it for his 
next neighbor, but it must have been heard 
over the space of a hundred square miles. I 
used to wonder what this might be. Could it 



44 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten 
thousand footsteps jarring and trampling along 
the stones of the neighboring city ? That would 
be continuous ; but this, as I have said, rose 
and fell in regular rhythm. I remember being 
told, and I suppose this to have been the true 
solution, that it was the sound of the waves 
after a high wind breaking on the long beaches 
many miles distant." 

After a year's study at Andover, he was 
fully prepared to enter Harvard University. 

In the Charlestown Navy Yard, at this time, 
was the old frigate Constitution, which the 
government purposed to break up as unfit for 
service, thoughtless of the desecration : 

There was an hour when patriots dared profane 
The mast that Britain strove to bow in vain, 
And one, who listened to the tale of shame, 
Whose heart still answered to that sacred name, 
Whose eye still followed o'er his country's tides 
Thy glorious flag, our brave Old Ironsides'. 
From yon lone attic, on a summer's morn, 
Thus mocked the spoilers with his school-boy scorn : 

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down ! 
Long has it waved on high, 
And many an eye has danced to see 
That banner in the sky; 



OTHER REMINISCENCES. 45 

Beneath it rung the battle shout, 

And burst the cannon's roar; 
The meteor of the ocean air 

Shall sweep the clouds no more! 

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood, 

Where knelt the vanquished foe, 
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, 

And waves were white below, 
No more shall feel the victor's tread, 

Or know the conquered knee ; 
The harpies of the shore shall pluck 

The eagle of the sea. 

Oh, better that her shattered hulk 

Should sink beneath the wave ; 
Her thunders shook the mighty deep, 

And there should be her grave ; 
Nail to the mast her holy flag, 

Set every thread-bare sail, 
And give her to the god of storms 

The lightning and the gale ! 

This stirring poem — the first to make him 
known — was written by Oliver Wendell Holme? 
in 1830, " with a pencil in the White Chamber 
Stans pede in tmo, pretty nearly," and was 
published in the Boston Advertiser. From these 
columns it was extensively copied by other 
newspapers throughout the country, and hand- 
bills containing the verses were circulated in 



46 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Washington. The eloquent, patriotic outburst 
not only brought instant fame to the young- 
poet, but so thoroughly aroused the heart of 
the people that the grand old vessel was saved 
from destruction. 

The " schoolboy " had already entered Harvard 
College, and among his classmates in that 
famous class of 1829, were Benjamin R. Curtis, 
afterwards Judge of the Supreme Court, James 
Freeman Clarke, Chandler Robbins, Samuel F. 
Smith (the author of " My country, 'tis of 
thee "), G. T. Bigelow (Judge of the Supreme 
Court of Massachusetts), G. T. Davis, and Ben- 
jamin Pierce. 

In the class just below him (1830) was 
Charles Sumner ; and his cousin, Wendell Phil- 
lips, with John Lothrop Motley, entered Har- 
vard during his Junior year. George Ticknor 
was one of his instructors, and Josiah Quincy 
became president of the college before he grad- 
uated. 

Throughout his whole college course Oliver 
Wendell Holmes maintained an excellent rank 
in scholars!! ip. He was a frequent contributor 
to the college periodicals, and delivered several 
poems upon a variety of subjects. One of 



OTHER REMINISCENCES. 47 

these was given before the " Hasty Pudding 
Club,"' and another entitled ''Forgotten Days," 
at an " Exhibition." He was the class poet ; 
was called upon to write the poem at Com- 
mencement, and was one of the sixteen chosen 
into the Phi Beta Kappa Society. * 

After his graduation, he studied law one year 
in the Dane Law School of Harvard College. It 
was at this time that The Collegian, a peri- 
odical published by a number of the Harvard 
under-graduates, was started at Cambridge. To 
this paper the young law student sent numerous 
anonymous contributions, among them " Evening, 
by a Tailor," "The Height of the Ridiculous," 
"The Meeting of the Dryads," and "The 
Spectre Pig." A brilliant little journal it must 
have been with Holmes' inimitable outbursts of 
wit, " Lochfast's " (William H. Simmons) trans- 
lations from Schiller, and the numerous pen 
thrusts from John O. Sargent, Robert Haber- 
sham and Theodore William Snow, who wrote 
under the respective signatures of " Charles 
Sherry," "Mr. Airy" and " Geoffery La 
Touche." Young Motley, too, was an occa- 
sional contributor to The Collegian, and his 

* From notes furnished by Dr. Holmes. 



48 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

brother-in-law, Park Benjamin, joined Holmes 
and Epes Sargent, in 1833, m writing a gift 
book called "The Harbinger," the profits of 
which were given to Dr. Howe's Asylum for 
\he blind 



ABROAD. 49 



CHAPTER V. 



ABROAD. 



AFTER a year's study of law, during which 
time the Muses were constantly tempting 
him to "pen a stanza when he should engross," 
young Holmes determined to take up the study 
of medicine, which was much more congenial 
to his tastes than the formulas of Coke and 
Blackstone. Doctor James Jackson and his 
associates were his instructors for the follow- 
ing two years and a half; and then before tak- 
ing his degree of M. D., he spent three years 
in Europe, perfecting his studies in the hospitals 
and lecture-rooms of Paris and Edinburgh. 

Of this European tour, we find occasional 
allusions scattered throughout his writings. 
Listen, for instance, to this grand description 
of Salisbury Cathedral : 

" It was the first cathedral we ever saw, 
and none has ever so impressed us since. 



50 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, 
just beginning to grow tall at the point where 
our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the 
whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over 
which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, 
abolishes that five or six foot personality in 
the beholder which is fostered by keeping 
company with the little life of the day in its 
little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as 
the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of 
Niagara the beating of your heart seems too 
trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In 
the buttressed hollow of one of these paleozoic 
cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and 
blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which 
your breathing structure reposes. . . . These 
old cathedrals are beyond all comparison, what 
are best worth seeing of man's handiwork 
in Europe." 

" Lively emotions very commonly do not 
strike us full in front, but obliquely from the 
side," he says at another time. "A scene or 
incident in undress often affects us more than 
one in full costume. 

Is this the mighty ocean? — is this all? 



ABBOAD. 51 

Says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that 
should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum 
did not come. But walking one day in the 
fields about the city, I stumbled over a frag- 
ment of broken masonry, and lo ! the World's 
Mistress in her stone girdle — alta mcenia 
Roma — rose before me, and whitened my 
cheek with her pale shadow, as never before or 
since. 

" I used very often, when coming home 
from my morning's work at one of the public 
institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old 
church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of 
St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles 
and votive tablets was there ; there was a 
noble organ with carved figures ; the pulpit 
was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stoop- 
ing Samson ; and there was a marvellous stair- 
case, like a coil of lace. These things I 
mention from memory, but not all of them to- 
gether impressed me so much as an inscription 
on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the 
walls. It told how this Church of St. Stephen 
was repaired and beautified in the 16**, and 
how during the celebration of its re-opening, 
two girls of the parish (filles de la paroisse), 



52 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the 
balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by 
miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, 
nameless, but real presences to my imagina- 
tion, as much as when they came fluttering 
down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed 
the sharpest treble in the Te Deum. All the 
crowd gone but these two filles de la paroisse — 
gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as 
the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread 
and meat that were in the market on that 
day. 

" Not the great historical events, but the 
personal incidents that call up single sharp pict- 
ures of some human being in its pang of 
struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the 
platform at Berne, over the parapet of which 
Theobald Weinzapfli's restive horse sprang with 
him and landed him more than a hundred feet 
beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely 
broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God's 
servant from that day forward. I have forgotten 
the famous bears and all else. I remember the 
Percy lion on the bridge over the little river 
at Alnwick — the leaden lion with his tail stretched 
out straight like a pump-handle — and why? 



ABROAD. 53 

Because of the story of the village boy who 
must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out 
over the water — which breaking, he dropped 
into the stream far below, and was taken out 
an idiot for the rest of his life." 

Again he says : " I once ascended the spire 
of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, 
I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone 
filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide 
puts his arms behind you to keep you from 
falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, 
and to think of having climbed it crisps all 
the fifty-six joints of one's twenty digits. While 
I was on it, 'pinnacled dim in the intense 
inane,' a strong wind was blowing, and I felt 
sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed 
back and forward like a stalk of rye, or a 
cat-o'-nine tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on 
it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said 
that the spire did leally swing back and for- 
ward, I think he said some feet. 

" Keep any line of knowledge ten years and 
some other line will intersect it. Long after 
I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril's in an 
old journal — the ' Magazin Eucyclopedque ' — for 
Van iroiseme (1795), when I stumbled upon a 



54 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

brief article on the vibrations of the spire of 
Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so the 
movement shall be shown in a vessel of water 
nearly seventy feet below the summit, and 
higher up the vibration is like that of an 
earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched 
wooden spires with which we very shabbily fin- 
ish some of our stone churches (thinking that 
the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the 
counterfeit we try to pass on it), swinging like 
a reed in a wind, but one would hardly think 
of such a thing happening in a stone spire." 

Nor does he forget that dear little child he 
saw and heard in a French hospital. " Between 
two and three years old. Fell out of her chair 
and snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, 
patient, gentle. Rough students round her, 
some in white aprons, looking fearfully business- 
like ; but the child placid, perfectly still. I 
spoke to her, and the blessed little creature 
answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweet- 
ness, with that reedy thrill in it which you 
have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I 
hear it at this moment. ' C est tout comme un- 
seriftt said the French student at my side." 

The ruins of a Roman aqueduct he describes 



>c^V? i-- .-^? 




ABROAD. 55 

in another place, and now and then some inci- 
dent that happened in England or Scotland, 
may be found among his writings; but when, 
after three years' absence, he returns to Cam- 
bridge and delivers his poem l jfore the " Phi 
Beta Kappa Society," he begs his classmates to — 

Ask no garlands sought beyond the tide ; 
But take the leaflets gathered at your side. 

How affectionately his thoughts turned home- 
ward is strikingly shown in the very first lines 
of the poem : 

Scenes of my youth! awake its slumbering fire! 

Ye winds of memory, sweep the silent lyre ! 

Ray of the past, if yet thou canst appear, 

Break through the clouds of Fancy's waning year ; 

Chase from her breast the thin autumnal snow, 

If leaf or blossom still is fresh below ! 

Long have I wandered ; the returning tide 

Brought back an exile to his cradle's side ; 

And as my bark her time-worn flag unrolled 

To greet the land-breeze with its faded fold, 

So, in remembrance of my boyhood's time, 

I lift these ensigns of neglected rhyme ; 

O more than blest, that all my wanderings through, 

My anchor falls where first my pennons flew ! 

And read yet again in another place this lov- 
ing tribute to the home of his childhood : 



56 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

"To what small things our memory and our 
affections attach themselves ! I remember when 
I was a child that one of the girls planted 
some Star of Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest 
corner of our front yard. Well, I left the pater- 
nal roof and wandered in other lands, and 
learned to think in the words of strange peo- 
ple. But after many years, as I looked in the 
little front yard again, it occurred to me that 
there used to be some Stars of Bethlehem in the 
southwest corner. The grass was tall there, and 
the blade of the plant is very much like grass, 
only thicker and glossier. 

" Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles 
when he hunted for the sphere-containing cyl- 
inder that marked the grave of Archimedes, 
so did I comb the grass with my fingers for 
my monumental memorial flower. Nature had 
stored my keepsake tenderly in her bosom. The 
glossy, faintly-streaked blades were there ; they 
are there still, though they never flower, dark- 
ened as they are by the shade of the elms 
and rooted in the matted turf. 

" Our hearts are held down to our homes by 
innumerable fibres, trivial as that I have just 
recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, 



ABROAD. 57 

you remember, by pinning his head a hair at 
a time. Even a stone, with a whitish bana 
crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the 
back yard, insisted on becoming one of the 
talismans of memory. 

"This intersusception of the ideas of inani- 
mate objects, and their faithful storing away 
among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured 
in the material structure of the thinking centre 
itself. In the very core of the brain, in the 
part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a 
small mineral deposit of grape-like masses of 
crystalline matter. 

"But the plants that come up every year 
in the same place, like the Stars of Bethle- 
hem, of all the lesser objects, give me the 
liveliest home-feeling." 

To return to the Phi Beta Kappa poem, 
modestly termed by the author "A Metrical 
Essay," it is interesting to note Lowell's hearty 
appreciation of it in his Fable for Critics : 

There's Holmes, who is matchless among you for wit, 
A Leyden jar always full-charged, from which flit 
The electrical tingles of hit after hit. 
In long poems 'tis painful sometimes, and invites 
A thought of the way the new telegraph writes, 
Which pricks down its little sharp sentences spitefully, 



58 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 

As if you got more than you'd title to rightfully. 

And you find yourself hoping its wild father Lightning 

Would flame in for a second and give you a fright'ning. 

He has perfect sway of what I call a sham metre, 

But many admire it, the English pentameter, 

And Campbell, I think, wrote most commonly worse, 

With less nerve, swing and fire, in the same kind of verse, 

Xor e'er achieved aught in 't so worthy of praise 

As the tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseillaise. 

You went crazy last year over Bulwer's New Simon; 

Why, if B., to the day of his dying should rhyme on, 

Heaping verses on verses and tomes upon tomes, 

He could ne'er reach the best point and vigor of Holmes ! 

His are just the fine hands, too, to weave you a lyric 

Full of fancy, fun, feeling, or spiced with satyric 

In a measure so kindly, you doubt if the toes 

That are trodden upon, are your own or your foes. 

This tribute of Holmes to the grand Marseil- 
laise is indeed one of the finest .passages in a 
poem abounding in point and vigor, as well as in 
fancy and feeling. Who can read these stirring 
lines without a sympathetic thrill for the watch- 
ing, weeping Rouget de 1' Isle, composing in one 
night both music and words of the nameless 
song ? 

The city slept beneath the moonbeam's glance, 
Her white walls gleaming through the vines of France, 
And all was hushed save where the footsteps fell 
On some high tower, of midnight sentinel. 



ABROAD. 59 

But one still watched ; no self-encircled woes 

Chased from his lids the angel of repose ; 

He watched, he wept, for thoughts of bitter years 

Bowed his dark lashes, wet with burning tears; 

His country's sufferings and her children's shame 

Streamed o'er his memory like a forest's flame, 

Each treasured insult, each remembered wrong, 

Rolled through his heart and kindled into song; 

His taper faded; and the morning gales 

Swept through the world the war song of Marseilles ! 

In this same Phi Beta Kappa poem may be 
found that beautiful pastoral, The Cambridge 
Churchyard, and 

Since the lyric dress 
Relieves the statelier with its sprightliness, 

the stirring verses on Old Ironsides are here 
repeated. Said one who heard young Holmes 
deliver this poem in the college church : 

" Extremely youthful in his appearance, bubbling 
over with the mingled humor and pathos that 
have always marked his poetry, and sparkling 
with the coruscations of his peculiar genius, he 
delivered the poem with a clear, ringing enuncia- 
tion which imparted to the hearers his own en- 
joyment of his thoughts and expressions." 



00 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER VI. 



CHANGE IN THE HOME. 



IN 1836, Oliver Wendell Holmes took his 
degree of M. D. The following year was 
made sadly memorable to the happy family at 
the parsonage by the death of the beloved 
father. He had reached his threescore years 
and ten, but still seemed so vigorous in mind and 
body that neither his family nor the parish were 
prepared for the sad event. Mary and Ann, 
the two eldest daughters, were already married ; 
the one to Usher Parson, M. D., the other to 
Honorable Charles Wentworth Upham. Sarah, 
the youngest, had died in early childhood, and 
only Oliver Wendell and his brother John 
remained of the once large family at the 
parsonage. Mrs. Holmes still continued to 
reside with her two sons in the old gambrel- 
roofed house which her father, Judge Oliver 
Wendell, had bought for her at the time of 
her marriage. 



CHANGE IX THE HOME. 61 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table thus describes 
me delightful old dwelling now used as one 
of the College buildings : 

" The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, 
that it has no place for ghosts. . . . Now the 
old house had wainscots behind which the mice 
were always scampering, and squeaking, and 
rattling down the plaster, and enacting family 
scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar 
where the cold slug clung to the walls and the 
misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish 
day ; where the green mould loved to grow, 
and the long, white, potato-shoots went feeling 
along the floor if happily they might find the 
daylight ; it had great brick pillars, always in a 
cold sweat with holding up the burden they 
had been aching under day and night for a century 
and more ; it had sepulchral arches closed by 
rough doors that hung on hinges rotten with 
rust, behind which doors, if there was not a 
heap of bones connected with a mysterious 
disappearance of long ago, there well might 
have been, for it was just the place to look for 
them. 

" Let us look at the garret as I can repro- 
duce it from memory. It has a flooring of 



62 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

lath, with ridges of mortar squeezed up between 
them, which if you tread on you will go to — 
the Lord have mercy on you ! where will you 
go to? — the same being crossed by narrow 
bridges of boards, on which you may put your 
feet, but with fear and trembling. 

" Above you and around you are beams and 
joists, on some of which you may see, w r hen 
the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal 
clippings of the broadaxes, showing the rude 
way in which the timber was shaped, as it came, 
full of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is 
a realm of darkness and thick dust, and shroud- 
like cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their 
gray folds. For a garret is like a seashore, 
where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to 
pieces. There is the cradle which the old man 
you just remember was rocked in ; there is the 
ruin of the bedstead he died on ; that ugly 
slanting contrivance used to be put under his 
pillow in the days when his breath came hard ; 
there is his old chair with both arms gone, 
symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing 
earthly left to lean on ; there is the large 
wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon 
sent the minister's lady, who thanked him gra- 



CHAXGE IN THE HOME. 63 

ciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting 
season bowed it out decently to the limbo of 
troublesome conveniences. And there are old 
leather portmanteaus, like stranded porpoises, 
their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the 
food with which they used to be gorged to 
bulging repletion ; and the empty churn with 
its idle dasher which the Nancys and Phebes, 
who have left their comfortable places to the 
Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good 
purpose ; and the brown, shaky old spinning- 
wheel, which was running, it may be, in the 
days when they were hanging the Salem 
witches. 

11 Under the dark and haunted garret were 
attic chambers which themselves had histories. 

The rooms of the second story, 

the chambers of birth and death, are sacred 
to silent memories. 

" Let us go down to the ground floor. I 
retain my doubts about those dents on the 
floor of the right-hand room, the study of 
successive occupants, said to have been made 
by the butts of the Continental militia's fire- 
locks, but this was the cause the story told 
me in childhood, laid them to. That military 



64 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

consultations were held in that room when the 
house was General Ward's headquarters, that 
the Provincial generals and colonels and other 
men of war there planned the movement which 
ended in the fortifying of Bunker's Hill, that 
Warren slept in the house the night before the 
battle, that President Langdon went forth from 
the western door and prayed for God's bless- 
ing on the men just setting forth on their 
bloody expedition — all these things have been 
told, and perhaps none of them need be 
doubted. ...... 

" In the days of my earliest remembrance, a 
row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard 
on the western side of the old mansion. 
Whether like the cypress, these trees suggest 
the idea of the funeral torch or the monu- 
mental spire, whether their tremulous leaves 
make us afraid by sympathy with their nervous 
thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of their 
leaves and their closely swathed limbs have in 
them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened 
in their cerements, I will not guess ; but they 
always seemed to me to give an air of sepul- 
chral sadness to the house before which they 
stood sentries. 



CHANGE IN THE HOME. 65 

"Not so with the row of elms you may see 
leading up towards the western entrance. I 
think the patriarch of them all went over in 
the great gale of 1815 ; I know I used to 
shake the youngest of them with my hands, 
stout as it is now, with a trunk that would 
defy the bully of Crotona, or the strong man 
whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved 
so disastrous. 

" The College plain would be nothing without 
its elms. As the long hair of a woman is a 
glory to her, so are these green tresses that 
bank themselves against the sky in thick clus- 
tered masses, the ornament and the pride of 
the classic green 

"There is a row of elms just in front of the 
old house on the south. When 1 was a child 
the one at the southwest corner was struck by 
lightning, and one of its limbs and a long 
ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully 
recovered its symmetry and vigor, and forty 
years and more afterwards a second thunder- 
bolt crashed upon it and set its heart on fire, 
like those of the lost souls in the Hall ot 
Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the 
axe finished what the the lightning had begun." 



66 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

" Ah me ! " he exclaims at another time, 
" what strains of unwritten verse pulsate through 
my soul when I open a certain closet in the 
ancient house where I was born ! On its 
shelves used to lie bundles of sweet marjoram 
and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and 
catnip ; there apples were stored until their 
seeds should grow black, which happy period 
there were sharp little milk teeth always ready 
to anticipate ; there peaches lay in the dark, 
thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, 
like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven 
in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the 
breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score 
of dead summers lingers yet in those dim 
recesses." 



THE PROFESSOB. 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE PROFESSOR. 



IN 1839, Doctor Holmes was appointed Professor 
of Anatomy and Physiology in Dartmouth 
College, and pleasantly describes in The Pro- 
fessor, his " Autumnal sojourn by the Connec- 
ticut, where it comes loitering down from its 
mountain fastnesses like a great lord swallowing 
up the small proprietary rivulets very quietly 
as it goes." The little country tavern where 
he stayed while delivering his lectures, he calls 
"that caravansary on the banks of the stream 
where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the 
jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commence- 
ment processions." And what a charming descrip- 
tion this of the little town of Hanover, " where 
blue Ascutney looked down from the far dis- 
tance and the ' hills of Beulah ' rolled up the 
opposite horizon in soft, climbing masses, so 
suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path 



68 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

that he (the Professor) used to look through 
his old ' Dollond ' to see if the Shining Ones 
were not within range of sight — sweet visions, 
sweetest in those Sunday walks which carried 
him by the peaceful common, through the sol- 
emn village lying in cataleptic stillness under 
the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the terminus 
of his harmless stroll, the spreading beech-tree." 

In 1840, Doctor Holmes was married to Amelia 
Lee Jackson, a daughter of Hon. Charles Jack- 
son, formerly judge of the Supreme Court of 
Massachusetts. The first home of the young 
couple was at No. 8, Montgomery Place, the 
house at the left-hand side of the court, and 
next the farther corner. Here Doctor Holmes 
resided for about eighteen years,* and here all 
his children were born. 

" When he entered that door, two shadows 
glided over the threshold ; five lingered in the 
doorway when he passed through it for the 
last time, and one of the shadows was claimed 
by its owner to be longer than his own. 
What changes he saw in that quiet place ! 
Death rained through every roof but his ; 
children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, 

•♦From note, furnished by Dr. Hi 



THE PROFESSOR. 69 

faded away, threw themselves away ; the whole 
drama of life was played in that stock company's 
theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was 
his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever 
entered his dwelling in that little court where 
he lived in gay loneliness so long." 

In order to devote himself more strictly to 
his practice in Boston, Doctor Holmes resigned 
his professorship at Dartmouth College soon 
after his marriage. During the summer months, 
however, he delivered lectures before the Berk- 
shire Medical School at Piftsfield, Mass., and 
established his summer residence " up among 
those hills that shut in the amber-flowing Hous- 
atonic, in the heme overlooking the winding 
stream and the smooth, flat meadow ; looked 
down upon by wild hills where the tracks of 
bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be 
seen upon the winter snow — a home," he adds, 
" where seven blessed summers were passed 
which stand in memory like the seven golden 
candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy 
dreamer." 

The township of Pontoosuc, now Pittsfield, in- 
cluding some twenty-four thousand acres, was 
bought by Doctor Holmes' great-grandfather, Jacob 



70 OLIVER 1VEXDELL HOLMES. 

Wendell, about the year 1734. It was on a 
small part of this large possession that " Canoe 
Place," the pleasant summer home of Doctor 
Holmes, was built. 

Hawthorne was then living at Lenox, which 
is only a few miles from Pittsfield, and in his 
contribution to Lowell's magazine, The Pioneer, 
in 1843, he describes in his Hall of Fantasy, the 
poets he saw " talking in groups, with a liveli- 
ness of expression, or ready smile, and a light, 
intellectual laughter which showed how rapidly 
the shafts of wit were glancing to and fro among 
them. In the most vivacious of these," he adds, 
" I recognized Holmes." 

Beside Hawthorne, there was Herman Mel- 
ville, Miss Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble near by 
on those " maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire," 
while Bryant and Ellery Channing not unfre- 
quently joined the brilliant circle in their sum- 
mer trips to the Stockbridge hills. 

In the Boston home of Doctor Holmes, John 
Lothrop Motley was a welcome visitor — a man 
whose " generous sympathies with popular liberty 
no homage paid to his genius by the class whose 
admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars 
could ever spoil." Both young men were mem- 



THE PROFESSOR. 71 

bers of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 
and after the death of Motley, Holmes became 
his biographer. 

Charles Sumner formed another of this pleas- 
ant literary coterie, and is described by Doctor 
Holmes, after a short acquaintance, as "an ami- 
able, blameless young man ; pleasant, affable and 
cheerful." Years after, when Sumner was as- 
saulted in the Senate, Doctor Holmes, at a pub- 
lic dinner in Boston, denounced in strong language, 
the shameful outrage as an assault not only upon 
the man, but upon the Union. 

At the Berkshire festivals, the poet was often 
called upon to furnish a song, and brimful of 
wit and wisdom they always were, though often 
composed upon the spur of the moment. Here 
is a part of one of them : 

Come back to your mother, ye children, for shame, 
Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame ! 
With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap, 
She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap. 

Come out from your alleys, your courts, and your lanes. 
And breathe, like young eagles, the air of our plains, 
Take a whiff from our fields, and your excellent wives 
Will declare it's all nonsense insuring your lives. 



72 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Come you of the law, who can talk, if you please, 
Till the Man in the Moon will declare it's a cheese^ 
And leave ' the old lady that never tell lies,' 
To sleep with her handkerchief over her eyes. 

Ye healers of men, for a moment decline 

Your feats in the rhubarb and ipecac line ; 

While you shut up your turnpike, your neighbors can go 

The old roundabout road, to the regions below. 

You clerk, on whose ears are a couple of pens, 
And whose head is an anthill of units and tens, 
Though Plato denies you, we welcome you still 
As a featherless biped, in spite of your quill. 

Poor drudge of the city ! how happy he feels 

With the burrs on his legs and the grass at his heels! 

No dodger behind, his bandannas to share, 

No constable grumbling " You mustn't walk there ! " 

In yonder green meadow, to memory dear, 

He slaps a mosquito and brushes a tear ; 

The dewdrops hang round him on blossoms and shoots, 

He breathes but one sigh for his youth and his boots. 

There stands the old schoolhouse, hard by the old church 

That tree at its side had the flavor of birch; 

O sweet were the days of his juvenile tricks, 

Though the prairie of youth had so many "big licks." 

By the side of yon river he weeps and he slumps, 
The boots fill with water as if they were pumps; 
Till, sated with rapture, he steals to his bed, 
With a glow in his heart, and a cold in his head. 



THE PROFESSOR. 73 

At the annual dinner of the Phi Beta Kappa 
Society, in 1843, Doctor Holmes read the fine 
poem entitled Terpsichore. 

Three years later he delivered Urania, A 
Rhyme Lesson before the Boston Mercantile 
Library Association. " To save a question that 
is sometimes put," remarks the poet, " it is 
proper to say that in naming these two poems 
after two of the Muses, nothing more was in- 
tended than a suggestion of their general char- 
acter and aim." 



74 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE LECTURER. 



WHEN Doctor Warren gave up the Park- 
man professorship at Harvard, in 1847, 
Doctor Holmes was appointed to take his place 
as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. For 
eight months of the year, four lectures are 
delivered each week in this department of the 
college, and yet Doctor Holmes still found time 
"between whiles," to attend to his Boston prac- 
tice, and to write many charming poems and 
essays. He also entered the lyceum arena, "an 
original American contrivance," as Theodore 
Parker describes it in 1857, "for educating the 
people. The world has nothing like it. In it 
are combined the best things of the Church : 
i. e., the preaching ; and of the College : 
i. e., the informing thought, with some of the 
fun of the theatre. Besides, it gives the rural 
districts a chance to see the men they read 
about — to sec the lions — for the lecturer is 



THE LECTUREU. 75 

also a show to the eyes. For ten years past 
six or eight of the most progressive minds in 
America have been lecturing fifty or a hundred 
times a year." 

Among the many subjects that Doctor Holmes 
touched upon in these lyceum lectures was a 
fine, witty, and remarkably just criticism on 
the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 
What a pity that Oscar Wilde and his brother 
poets of this later day could not have the ben- 
efit of just such a clear, microscopic analysis ! 
What the Autocrat himself thought of these 
lecturing tours through the country we have in 
his own words : 

"I have played the part of 'Poor Gentleman' 
before many audiences," he says ; " more, I trust, 
than I shall ever face again. I did not wear 
a stage costume, nor a wig, nor mustaches of 
burnt cork ; but I was placarded and announced 
as a public performer, and at the proper hour 
I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile 
upon my countenance, and made my bow and 
acted my part. I have seen my name stuck up 
in letters so big that I was ashamed to show 
myself in the place by daylight. I have gone 
to a town with a sober literary essay in my 



f 6 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced 
as the most desperate of buffos. I have been 
through as many hardships as Ulysses in the 
exercise of my histrionic vocation. I have 
sometimes felt as if I were a wandering spirit, 
and this great, unchanging multivertebrate which 
I faced night after night was one ever-listening 
animal, which writhed along after me wherever 
I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening 
turning up to me the same sleepless eyes which 
I thought I had closed with my last drowsy 
incantation." 

Of his audiences he writes again as follows : 
" Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, 
are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely 
undistinguishable in many cases by any definite 
mark, and there is nothing but the place and 
time by which one can tell the ' remarkably 
intelligent audience ' of a town in New York 
or Ohio from one in any New England town 
of similar size. Of course, if any ^principle of 
selection has come in, as in those special asso- 
ciations of young men which are common in 
cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assem- 
blage. But let there be no such interfering 
circumstances, and one knows pretty well even 



THE LECTURER. 77 

the look the audience will have, before he goes 
in. Front seats, a few old folks — shiny-headed — 
slant up best ear toward the speaker — drop 
off asleep after a while, when the air begins 
to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. 
Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, 
a little behind these, but toward the front — 
(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that). 
Here and there a countenance, sharp and 
scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones 
sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs 
of young people — happy, but not always very 
attentive. Boys in the background more or less 
quiet. Dull faces here, there — in how many 
places ! I don't say dull people, but faces with- 
out a ray of sympathy or a movement of 
expression. They are what kill the lecturer. 
These negative faces with their vacuous eyes 
and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm 
soul out of him ; — that is the chief reason why 
lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. 
" Out of all these inevitable elements the 
audience is generated — a great compound ver- 
tebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen 
as any two mammals of the same species are 
like each other." 



78 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

"Pretty nigh killed himself," says the good 
landlady, " goin' about lecterin' two or three 
winters, talking in cold country lyceums — as he 
used to say — goin' home to cold parlors and 
bein' treated to cold apples and cold water, and 
then goin' up into a cold bed in a cold 
chamber, and comin' home next mornin' with 
a cold in his head as bad as the horse dis- 
temper. Then he'd look kind of sorry for havin' 
said it, and tell how kind some of the good 
women was to him ; how one spread an eider- 
down comforter for him, and another fixed up 
somethin' hot for him after the lectur, and 
another one said, ' There now, you smoke that 
cigar of yours after the lectur, jest as if you 
was at home,' and if they'd all been like that, 
he'd have gone on lecturing forever, but, as it 
was, he had got pooty nigh enough of it, and 
preferred a nateral death to puttin' himself out 
of the world by such violent means as lec- 
turin'." 

To these graphic pictures of the -'lyceum 
lecturer " we would add one more which was 
given by Mr. J. W. Harper, at the Holmes 
Breakfast. 

" I well remember." he said, " the first time 



THE LECTURER. 79 

I saw Doctor Holmes. It was long ago; not 
as our' Autocrat expresses it, ' in the year 
eighteen hundred and ever so few ; ' nor, as 
Thackeray has it, ' when the present century 
was in its teens.' It was just after the close 
of the last half century, and on a cold winter's 
afternoon, when the sun was fast setting behind 
the then ungilded dome of the State House, 
and it was in old Bromfield street. It was not 
in the Bromfield Street Methodist Church, nor 
in the contiguous Methodist inn, known as the 
Bromfield House, which, for many years, might 
have been the convenient resort of good Meth- 
odist elders, and of the peripatetic presiding 
elders, who were called by the genial Bishop 
Wainwright, the ' bob-tailed bishops ' of their 
flocks and districts. ... I was in the large 
stable adjoining the Bromfield House, endeavor- 
ing to secure a sleigh, when there entered a 
gentleman apparently of my own age. He came 
in quickly, and with impatience demanded the 
immediate production of a team and sleigh, 
which, though ordered for him, had somehow 
been forgotten. The new-comer, it was evident, 
was not to be trifled with. There was no non- 
sense about him, and I was not surprised, 



80 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

when, a few years later, I learned that he had 
become an Autocrat. 

" On that particular night he had a long drive 
before him, for he was to lecture at Newbury- 
port, or Nantasket, or Nantucket, or some other 
then unannexed suburb of Boston. I doubt if 
the horse survived the drive, and I am quite 
sure he is not now living. But the driver lives, 
and the young New Yorker who then admired 
him, and would fain have driven with him on 
that cold winter night, has since, in common 
with thousands of other New Yorkers, been filled 
with grateful admiration for what that driver has 
done for literature, and for the happiness and 
improvement of the world." 

In 1838 Doctor Holmes wrote the Boylston 
Prize Dissertation, and in 1842, HomceopotJiy and 
its kindred DelusioJts. The Boylston prizes 
were established in 1803, by Ward Nicholas 
Boylston. Doctor Holmes gained three of these 
prizes, and the Dissertations, one of which was 
upon Intermittent Fever, were published to- 
gether in book form in 1838. 

When, in February of the same year (1842), 
the young men of Boston gave a dinner to 
Charles Dickens, Doctor Holmes welcomed the 



THE LEC TUBER. 81 

distinguished visitor in the following beautiful 
song : • 

The stars their early vigils keep, 

The silent hours are near, 
When drooping eyes forget to weep — 

Yet still we linger here ; 
And what — the passing churl may ask — 

Can claim such wondrous power, 
That Toil forgets his wonted task, 

And Love his promised hour ? 

The Irish harp no longer thrills, 

Or breathes a fainter tone ; 
The clarion blast from Scotland's hills 

Alas ! no more is blown. 
And Passion's burning lip bewails 

Her Harold's wasted fire, 
Still lingering o'er the dust that veils 

The Lord of England's lyre. 

But grieve not o'er its broken strings, 

Nor think its soul hath died, 
While yet the lark at heaven's gate sings, 

As once o'er Avon's side ; — 
While gentle summer sheds her bloom, 

And dewy blossoms wave, 
Alike o'er Juliet's storied tomb 

And Nelly's nameless grave. 

inot qlorious island of the sea! 
Thcu^r« wide the wasting flood 
That parts :ux distant land from thee, 



82 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

We claim thy generous blood. 
Nor o'er thy far horizon springs 

One hallowed star of fame, 
But kindles, like an angel's wings, 

Our western skies in flame ! 



NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 83 



CHAPTER IX. 

NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 

IN the year 1857, Mr. Phillips, of the firm of 
Phillips & Sampson, undertook the publica- 
tion in Boston, of a new literary magazine. 
They were fortunate in securing James Russell 
Lowell as editor, and one condition he made 
upon accepting the office was, that his friend, 
Doctor Holmes, should be one of the chief 
contributors. 

It was the latter, also, who was called upon 
to name the new magazine. Thus was the 
Atlantic Monthly launched upon the great sea 
of literature — a periodical that has never lost 
its first high prestige. 

When Doctor Holmes sat down to write his 
first article for the new magazine, he remem- 
bered that some twenty-five years before, he 
had begun a series of papers for a certain New 
England Magazine, published in Boston, by J. 
T. & E. Buckingham, with the title of Autocrat 



84 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

of the Breakfast-Table. Curious, as he says, to 
try the experiment of shaking the same bough 
again and finding out if the ripe fruit were 
better or worse than the early wind-falls, he 
took the same title for his new articles. 

" The man is father to the boy that was," he 
adds, " and I am my own son, as it seems to 
me, in those papers of the New England Mag- 
azine." 

To show the reader some family traits of this 
"young autocrat," we quote from these earlier 
articles the following fine extracts : 

" When I feel inclined to read poetry, I take 
down my dictionary. The poetry of words is 
quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The 
author may arrange the gems effectively, but 
their shape and lustre have been given by the 
attrition of ages. Bring me the finest simile 
from the whole range of imaginative writing, and 
I will show you a single word which conveys 
a more profound, a more accurate, and a more 
eloquent analogy. 

" Once on a time, a notion was started that 
if all the people in the world would shout at 
once, it might be heard in the moon. So the 
projectors agreed it should be done in just ten 



NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 85 

years. Some thousand shiploads of chronometers 
were distributed to the selectmen and other 
great folks of all the different nations. For a 
year beforehand, nothing else was talked about 
but the awful noise that was to be made on 
the great occasion. When the time came every- 
body had their ears so wide open to hear the 
universal ejaculation of boo — the word agreed 
upon — that nobody spoke except a deaf man 
in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in 
Pekin, so that the world was never so still 
since the creation." 

At the close of the year when the twelve 
numbers of The Autocrat of the Breakfast -Table 
were completed in the Atlantic Monthly and 
published in book form, the British Review 
wrote of the illustrious author as follows : 

" Oliver Wendell Holmes has been long 
known in this country as the author of some 
poems written in stately classic verse, abounding 
in happy thoughts and bright bird-peeps of 
fancy, such as this, for example : 

The punch-bowl's sounding depths were stirred, 
Its silver cherubs smiling as they heard. 

And this first glint of spring — 



86 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

The spendthrift Crocus, bursting through the mould, 
Naked and shivering with his cup of gold. 

He is also known as the writer of many pieces 
which wear a serious look until they break out 
into a laugh at the end, perhaps in the last 
line, as with those on Lending a Punch Bozul, 
a cunning way of the writer's ; just as the knot 
is tied in the whip cord at the end of the 
lash to enhance the smack. 

" But neither of these kinds of verse prepared 
us for anything so good, so sustained, so 
national, and yet so akin to our finest humor- 
ists, as The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table ; 
a very delightful book — a handy book for the 
breakfast table. A book to conjure up a cosey 
winter picture of a ruddy fire and singing 
kettle, soft hearth-rug, warm slippers, and easy 
chair ; a musical chime of cups and saucers, 
fragrance of tea and toast within, and those 
flowers of frost fading on the windows without 
as though old Winter just looked in, but his 
cold breath was melted, and so he passed by. 
A book to possess two copies of ; one to be 
read and marked, thumbed and dog-eared ; and 
one to stand up in its pride of place with the 
rest on the: shelves, all ranged in shining rows, 



NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 87 

as dear old friends, and not merely as nodding 
acquaintances. 

" Not at all like that ponderous and over- 
bearing autocrat, Doctor Johnson, is our Yankee 
friend. He has more of Goldsmith's sweetness 
and lovability. He is as true a lover of ele- 
gance and high bred grace, dainty fancies, and 
all pleasurable things, as was Leigh Hunt ; he 
has more wordly sense without the moral lan- 
guor ; but there is the same boy-heart beating 
in a manly breast, beneath the poet's singing 
robe. For he is a poet as well as a humorist. 
Indeed, although this book is written in prose, 
it is full of poetry, with the ' beaded bubbles ' 
of humor dancing up through the true hippo- 
crene and ' winking at the brim ' with a win- 
ning look of invitation shining in their merry 
eyes. 

"The humor and the poetry of the book do 
not lie in tangible nuggets for extraction, but 
they are there ; they pervade it from beginning 
to end. We cannot spoon out the sparkles of 
sunshine as they shimmer on the wavelets of 
water ; but they are there, moving in all their 
golden life and evanescent grace. 

" Holmes may not be so recognizably national 



£8 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

as Lowell ; his prominent characteristics are not 
so exceptionally Yankee; the traits are not so 
peculiar as those delineated in the Biglow Papers. 
But he is national. One of the most hopeful 
literary signs of this book is its quiet nation- 
ality. The writer has made no straining and 
gasping efforts after that which is striking and 
peculiar, which has always been the bane of 
youth, whether in nations or individuals. He 
has been content to take the common, home- 
spun, everyday humanity that he found ready 
to hand — people who do congregate around the 
breakfast table of an American boarding-house ; 
and out of this material he has wrought with 
a vivid touch and truth of portraiture, and won 
the most legitimate triumph of a genuine 

book 

" Holmes has the pleasantest possible way of 
saying things that many people don't like to 
hear. His tonics are bitter and bland. He 
iloes not spare the various foibles and vices of 
his countrymen and women. But it is done so 
good-naturedly, or with a sly puff of diamond 
dust in the eyes of the victims, who don't see 
the joke which is so apparent to us. As good 
old Isaak Walton advises respecting the worm, 






NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 89 

he impales them tenderly as though he loved 
them."' 

How vividly every personage around that 
delightful "Breakfast-Table" is photographed 
upon the reader's mind ! Can you not see the 
dear " Old Gentleman " just opposite the " Auto- 
crat," as he suddenly surprises the company by 
repeating a beautiful hymn he learned in child- 
hood ? And the pale sweet "Schoolmistress" 
in her modest mourning dress ? no wonder the 
eyes of the Autocrat frequently wandered to 
that part of the table and certain remarks are 
addressed to her alone ! To tell the truth, we 
can't help falling in love with her ourselves ! 
What a fine foil to this " soft-voiced little 
woman," is the landlady's daughter — that " ten- 
der-eyed blonde, with her long ringlets, cameo 
pin, gold pencil-case on a chain, locket, bracelet, 
album, autograph book, and accordion — who 
says ' Yes ? ' when you tell her anything, and 
reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus Cobb Junior, 
while her mother makes the puddings ! " Then 
there is the " poor relation " from the 
country — "a somewhat more than middle-aged 
female, with parchment forehead and a dry little 



90 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

frizette shingling it. a sallow neck with a neck- 
lace of gold beads, and a black dress too rusty 
for recent grief." Can you not hear the very 
tones of her high-pitched voice as she remarks 
that "Buckwheat is skerce and high." 

"The "Professor" under chloroform — "the 
young man whom they call John," appropri- 
ating the three peaches in illustration of the 
Autocrat's metaphysics — the boy, Benjamin 
Franklin, poring over his French exercises — 
the Poet, who had to leave town when the 
anniversaries came round — and the divinity 
student whose head the Autocrat tries occa- 
sionally, " as housewives try eggs," all these 
are so real to the reader that he can but feel 
they were something more than imaginary char- 
acters to the writer. 

Among the poems that close each number 
of the Autocrat, are some of the finest in our 
language. The Chambered Nautilus, The Living 
Temple, The Voiceless, and The Two Armies, are 
full of inspiring thought and deep pathos, while 
The Deacons Masterpiece, Parson TurelVs Legacy^ 
The Old Mans Dream, and Contentment, sparkle 
with the Autocrat's own peculiar humor. 

"When we think of the familiar confidences 
of the Autocrat," says Underwood, "we might 



NAMING THE NEW MAGAZINE. 91 

liken him to Montaigne. But when the parallel 
is being considered, we come upon passages so 
full of tingling hits or of rollicking fun, that we 
are sure we are mistaken, and that he resembles 
no one so much as Sidney Smith. But pres- 
ently he sounds the depths of our consciousness, 
explores the concealed channels of feeling, 
flashes the light of genius upon our half- 
acknowledged thoughts, and we see that this 
is what neither the great Gascon nor the hearty 
and jovial Englishman could have attempted, 
. . . . when the world forgets the sallies 
that have set tables in a roar, and even the 
lyrics that have set a nation's heart on fire, 
Holmes' picture of the ship of pearl will 
preserve his name forever." 



92 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER X. 



ELSIE VENNER. 



THE Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was 
followed in 1859 D ) r The Professor, a 
series of similar essays, in which we are intro- 
duced to "Iris" and "Little Boston," and 
begin to realize Doctor Holmes' inimitable 
skill in dramatic effect as well as in character 
painting. The Story of Iris has been printed 
by itself in Rossiter Johnson's Little Classics, 
and reads like an exquisite prose poem ; but 
after all, we like best to follow the delicate 
thread of narrative just as the professor him- 
self has introduced it — a dainty aria whose 
harmony runs under and over and all through 
the deep philosophy and sparkling table talk 
of the book. 

It prepares us, too, for Elsie Verifier* the 
"Professor's Story" — a novel whose weird 
conception holds us spell-bound from beginning 



ELSIE VENNER. 93 

to end, in spite of the sadness — " the pity of 
it." At the very first introduction to Elsie 
we have a hint of the strange hereditary 
curse that throws its blight over her whole 
nature : 

" Who and what is that," asks the new 
master, " sitting a little apart there — that 
strange, wild-looking girl?" 

The lady teacher's face changed ; one would 
have said she was frightened or troubled. She 
looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might 
hear the master's question and its answer. 
But the girl did not look up ; she was wind- 
ing a gold chain about her wrist, and then 
uncoiling it, as if in a kind of reverie. 

Miss Dailey drew close to the master and 
placed her hand so as to hide her lips. 

"Don't look at her as if we were talking 
about her," she whispered softly, " that is Elsie 
Venner." 

The more we read of her, the more her sad 
beauty fascinates us. 

" She looked as if she might hate, but could 
not love. She hardly smiled at anything, spoke 
rarely, but seemed to feel that her natural 
power of expression lay all in her bright eyes, 



94 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

the force of which so many had felt, but none 
perhaps had tried to explain to themselves. 
A person accustomed to watch the faces of 
those who were ailing in body or mind, and 
to search in every line and tint for some 
underlying source of disorder, could hardly help 
analyzing the impression such a face produced 
upon him. The light of those beautiful eyes 
was like the lustre of ice ; in all her features 
there was nothing of that human warmth which 
shows that sympathy has reached the soul 
beneath the mask of flesh it wears. The look 
was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. 
There was in its stony apathy the pathos 
which we find in the blind who show no film 
or speck over the organs of sight ; for Nature 
had meant her to be lovely, and left out 
nothing but love." 

The mother of Elsie, some months before the 
birth of her child, had been bitten by a rattle- 
snake. The instant use of powerful antidotes 
seemed to arrest the fatal poison, but death 
ensued a few weeks after the birth of her 
little girl. 

"There was something not human looking 
out of Elsie's eyes. . . There were two 



ELSIE VEX NEE. 95 

warring principles in that superb organization 
and proud soul. One made her a woman, 
with all a woman's powers and longings. The 
other chilled all the currents of outlets for her 
emotions. It made her tearless and mute, 
when another woman would have wept and 
pleaded. And it infused into her soul some- 
thing — it was cruel to call it malice — which 
was still and watchful and dangerous — which 
waited its opportunity, and then shot like an 
arrow from its bow out of the coil of brood- 
ing premeditation." 

But the cloud — "the ante-natal impression 
which had mingled an alien element in Elsie's 
nature" — is mercifully lifted just before her 
death. 

She had fallen into a light slumber, and 
when she awoke and looked up into her 
father's face, she seemed to realize his tender- 
ness and affection as never before. 

"Elsie dear," he said, "we were thinking 
how much your expression was, sometimes, like 
that of your sweet mother. If you could but 
have seen her so as to remember her ! " 

The tender look and tone, the yearning of 
the daughter's heart for the mother she had 



96 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

never seen, save only with the unfixed, undis- 
tinguishable eyes of earliest infancy, perhaps 
the understanding that she might soon rejoin 
her in another state of being, — all came upon 
her with a sudden overflow of feeling which 
broke through all the barriers between her 
heart and her eyes, and Elsie wept. It seemed 
to her father as if the malign influence — evil 
spirit it might almost be called — which had 
pervaded her being, had at least been driven 
forth or exorcised, and that these tears were 
at once the sign and pledge of her redeemed 
nature. But now she was to be soothed and 
not excited. After her tears she slept again, 
and the look her face wore was peaceful as 
never before. 

While "Elsie Venner" is a purely imaginary 
conception, the author tells us that after be- 
ginning the story he received the most strik- 
ing confirmation of the possibility of the 
existence of such a character. The reader is 
awakened to new views of human responsibil- 
ity in the perusal of Elsie's life, and with 
good old pastor Iloneywood learns a lesson of 
patience with his fellow creatures in their in- 
born peculiarities and of charity in judging 



ELSIE VENNER. 97 

what seem to him wilful faults of character. 

The Professor's story while centring the in- 
terest upon Elsie, gives numerous side glances 
of New England village life ; and old Sophy, 
Helen Darley, Silas Peckham, Bernard Lang- 
don, Dick Venner, and the good Doctor are 
portrayed in vivid colors. There is a deal of 
psychology throughout the book, and not a 
little theology — good wholesome theology too, 
as the following brief extract shows : 

" The good minister was as kind-hearted as 
if he had never groped in the dust and ashes 
of those cruel old abstractions which have 
killed out so much of the world's life and 
happiness. ' With the heart man believeth unto 
righteousness ; ' a man's love is the measure 
of his fitness for good or bad company here 
or elsewhere. Men are tattooed with their 
special beliefs like so many South Sea Island- 
ers ; but a real human heart, with divine 
love in it, beats with the same glow under 
all the patterns of all earth's thousand tribes!" 

The pathos of poor Elsie's story is relieved 
now and then by humorous descriptions of 
country manners and customs. The Sprowles' 
party and the Widow Rowcn's "tea-fight" 



98 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

give a vein of light comedy that rests the sym- 
pathetic reader as a sudden merry smile upon 
a grave and troubled face. 

The Guardian Angel, the second novel of 
Doctor Holmes, was not published until 1867, 
but it is interesting to compare the two 
stories, for there is a strong family likeness 
between them. Both show the power of in- 
herited tendencies, though Myrtle Hazard, the 
heroine of The Guardian Angel, has no alien 
element in her blood like that which tormented 
poor Elsie. With Myrtle "it was as when 
several grafts, bearing fruit that ripens at dif- 
ferent times, are growing upon the same 
stock. Her earlier impulses may have been 
derived directly from her father and mother, 
but various ancestors came uppermost in their 
time before the absolute and total result of 
their several forces had found its equilibrium 
in the character by which she was to be 
known as an individual. These inherited im- 
pulses were therefore many, conflicting, some 
of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, 
and the Devil held mortgages on her life be- 
fore its deed was put in her hands; but 
sweet and gracious influences were also born 



ELSIE VENNER. 99 

with her; and the battle of life was to be 
fought between them, God helping her in her 
need, and her own free choice siding with one 
or the other." 

The scene opens in a quiet New England 
village which is roused from its usual lethargy 
by the startling announcement in the weekly 
paper of a lost child. This is none other than 
the little orphan, Myrtle Hazard, who after a 
few dreary years in the dismal Withers home- 
stead, escapes by night in her little boat, is 
rescued by a young student from a frightful 
death at the rapids, and brought back to her 
distressed Aunt Silence by good old Byles 
Gridley — the true " Guardian Angel" of her 
life. 

When old Doctor Hurlbut " ninety-two, very 
deaf, very feeble, yet a wise counsellor in 
doubtful and difficult cases," comes to prescribe 
for the young girl, he says to his son : 

" I've seen that look on another face of the 
same blood — it's a great many years ago, and 
she was dead before you were born, my boy, 
— but I've seen that look, and it meant trouble 
then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now. I 
see some danger of a brain fever. And if she 



100 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 

doesn't have that, then look out for some hys- 
teric fits that will make mischief. .... 
I've been through it all before in that same 
house. Live folks are only dead folks warmed 
over. I can see 'em all in that girl's face. — 
Handsome Judith to begin with. And that 
queer woman, the Deacon's mother — there's 
where she gets that hystericky look. Yes, and 
the black-eyed woman with the Indian blood 
in her — look out for that — look out for that. 

. . . . Four generations — four generations, 
man and wife — yes, five generations before 
this Hazard child I've looked on with these 
old eyes. And it seems to me that I can see 
something of almost every one of 'em in this 
child's face — it's the forehead of this one, and 
it's the eyes of that one, and it's that other's 
mouth, and the look that I remember in 
another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard 
that same voice before — yes, yes — as long 
ago as when I was first married." 

Aside from the interest of the story there is 
a strange fascination in tracing the development 
of these various ancestral traits. 

" This body in which we journey across the 
isthmus between the two oceans is not a pri- 



ELSIE VENNER. 101 

vate carriage, but an omnibus," says old Byles 
Gridley ■ in his Thoughts on the Universe — 
dead book that was destined to so grand a 
resurrection ! Surely no one can deny the suc- 
cessive development of inherited bodily aspects 
and habitudes, and the same thing happens, the 
author avers, "in the mental and moral nature, 
though the latter may be less obvious to com- 
mon observation." 

The Guardian Angel while a deep study 
of the Reflex Function in its higher sphere, is 
not without its lighter, more mirthful side. Says 
The London News, " the story is exceedingly 
humorous and comic in the less serious chap- 
ters. There is no such minor poet in the 
whole range of fiction as the immortal Gifted 
Hopkins. In the character of Hopkins all the 
foibles and vanities of the literary nature are 
exemplified in the most mirthful manner. If 
Doctor Holmes has more characters like Gifted 
Hopkins in his mind, the hilarity of two con- 
tinents is not in much danger of being extin- 
guished." 

Here is a glimpse of the young poet when 
racked with jealousy : 

" He retired pensive from the interview, and 



102 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

flinging himself at his desk, attempted wreak- 
ing his thoughts upon expression, to borrow 
the language of one of his brother bards, in a 
passionate lyric which he began thus : 

Another's ! 
Another's ! O the pang, the smart ! 

Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge — 
The barbed fang has rent a heart 

Which — which 

judge — judge — no, not judge. Budge, drudge, 
fudge — what a disgusting language English 
is ! Nothing fit to couple with such a word as 
grudge! And an impassioned moment arrested 
in full flow, stopped short, corked up, for want 
of a paltry rhyme! Judge — budge — drudge 
nudge — oh ! — smudge — misery ! — fudge. In 
vain — futile — no use — all up for to-night!'" 

The next day the dejected poet "wandered 
about with a dreadfully disconsolate look upon 
his countenance. He showed a falling-off in 
his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and 

disturbed his mother The most 

touching evidence of his unhappiness — whether 
intentional on the result of accident was not 
evident — was a broken heart, which he left 
upon his plate, the meaning of which was as 



ELSIE VENNER. 103 

plain as anything in the language of flowers. 
His thoughts were gloomy, running a good 
deal on the more picturesque and impressive 
methods of bidding a voluntary farewell to a 
world which had allured him with visions of 
beauty only to snatch them from his impassioned 
gaze. His mother saw something of this, and got 
from him a few disjointed words, which led her 
to lock up the clothes-line and hide her late hus- 
band's razors — an affectionate, yet perhaps unnec- 
essary precaution, for self-elimination contemplated 
from this point of view by those who have the 
natural outlet of verse to relieve them is rarely 
followed by a casualty. It may be considered 
as implying a more than average chance for 
longevity ; as those who meditate an imposing 
finish naturally save themselves for it, and are 
therefore careful of their health until the time 
comes, and this is apt to be indefinitely post- 
poned so long as there is a poem to write or 
a proof to be corrected." 

Gifted Hopkins survives the ordeal, and com- 
pletes his volume of poems, Blossoms of tlic 
Soul. Good old master Gridley, who foresees 
what the end will be, offers to accompany the 
young poet in his visit to the city publisher. 



104 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

What a world of pathos there is in the fond 
mother's preparations for the momentous jour- 
ney : She brings down from the garret " a 
capacious trunk, of solid wood, but covered 
with leather, and adorned with brass-headed 
nails, by the cunning disposition of which, also, 
the paternal initials stood out on the rounded 
lid, in the most conspicuous manner. It was 
his father's trunk, and the first thing that 
went into it, as the widow lifted the cover, 
and the smothering shut-up smell struck an old 
chord of associations, was a single tear-drop. 
How well she remembered the time when she 
first unpacked it for her young husband, and 
the white shirt bosoms showed their snowy 
plaits ! O dear, dear ! 

" But women decant their affections, sweet 
and sound, out of the old bottles into the new 
ones — off from the lees of the past genera- 
tion, clear and bright, into the clean vessels 
just made ready to receive it. Gifted Hopkins 
was his mother's idol, and no wonder. She 
had not only the common attachment of a 
parent for him, as her offspring, but she felt 
that her race was to be rendered illustrious by 
genius, and thought proudly of the time 



ELSIE VENNEB. 105 

when some future biographer would mention 
her own' humble name, to be held in lasting 
remembrance as that of the mother of Hopkins." 

The description of the various articles that 
went into the trunk is humorous enough. 

" Best clothes and common clothes, thick 
clothes and thin clothes, flannels and linens, 
socks and collars, with handkerchiefs enough to 
keep the pickpockets busy for a week, with a 
paper of gingerbread and some lozenges for 
gastralgia, and ' hot drops,' and ruled paper to 
write letters on, and a little Bible and a phial 
with hiera piera, and another with paregoric, 
and another with 'camphire' for sprains and 
bruises. Gifted went forth equipped for every 
climate from the tropic to the pole, and armed 
against every malady from ague to zoster." 

The poet's interview with the publisher is 
one of the best things in the book, but to be 
thoroughly enjoyed, it must be read entire. 

The genial, kindly nature of Doctor Holmes 
is strikingly shown throughout the whole volume. 
Good, quaint Byles Gridley endears himself more 
and more to the reader, Gifted Hopkins finds 
in his heart's choice an appreciative, admiring 
audience of at least one, Cyprian Eveleth and 



106 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

young Doctor Hurlbut are most happily disposed 
of, Clement Lindsay receives his reward, Myrtle 
Hazard emerges from the conflict of mingled 
lives in her blood with the dross of her nature 
burned away, aunt Silence throws off her melan- 
choly, Miss Cynthia Badlam repents of her evil 
manceuvrings and dies "with the comfortable 
assurance that she is going to a better world," 
the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker learns to 
appreciate his patient wife — even Murray 
Bradshaw, the acknowledged villain of the book, 
is not without a few redeeming traits, and we 
close the volume with a sense of hearty good- 
will and fervent charity toward all mankind. 



FUETHEB ACQUAINTANCE. 1Q7 



CHAPTER XL 

FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. 

BETWEEN the writing of Elsie Venner 
and The Gtiardian Angel, Doctor Holmes 
wrote a number of essays for the Atlantic 
Monthly, some of which were afterwards col- 
lected in the volume entitled Soundings from 
the Atlantic. 

Currents and Counter-currents was published 
in 1 86 1, and Border-lines of Knowledge in 1862. 
The two latter books deal with scientific sub- 
jects, but are written in such an attractive 
style that they have been extremely popular 
not only with students but with the whole 
reading public. Songs in many Keys, a volume 
of poems dedicated to his mother, was pub- 
lished by Doctor Holme* in 1862. Mechanism 
in Thoughts and Morals appeared in 1871, the 
same year that The Poet at the Breakfast-Table 
was running as a serial in the Atlantic 



108 OLIVER WENDELL HOLME W. 

Monthly > and numerous stray poems were also 
written in this prolific decade. In 1872 the 
poet's breakfast talk was published in book 
form. It is interesting to compare these three 
volumes — The Autocrat, the Professor, and the 
Poet. As a series they are as necessary to 
one another as the three strands of a cable, 
and yet each volume is, in a certain way, 
completed in itself. Where in the whole range 
of the English language, or indeed, of any 
language, will you find such an overflow of 
spontaneous wit and humor ? While in no 
sense a story or even a narrative, the breakfast 
talk is enlivened by wonderfully life-like char- 
acters. We can easily imagine ourselves sitting 
beside them at the social table, and just as it 
is in real life, these chance acquaintances touch 
us at different points, awaken various degrees 
of interest, and are at all times quite distinct 
from the observer's own individuality. 

There is not a page without its sparkle of 
humor, and nugget of sound philosophy beneath, 
which the reader appropriates to himself in a 
delightfully unconscious manner — for the time 
being, it is he who is the Autocrat, the Pro- 
fessor, the Poet ! As some one has truly said, 



FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. 109 

" It is our thoughts which Doctor Holmes 
speaks ; it is our humor to which he gives 
expression ; it is the pictures of our own 
fancy that he clothes in words, and shows us 
what we ourselves thought, and only lacked 
the means of expressing. We never realized 
until he taught us by his magic power over 
us, how much each of us had of genius and 
invention and expression." 

Each book has its little romance, and the 
" Poet " introduces a poor gentlewoman whose 
story interests us quite as much as does 
that of the two lovers. 

" In a little chamber," he says, " into which 
a small thread of sunshine finds its way for 
half an hour or so every day during a month 
or six weeks of the spring or autumn, at all 
other times obliged to content itself with 
ungilded daylight, lives this boarder, whom, 
without wronging any others of our company, 
I may call, as she is very generally called in 
the household, the Lady 

" From an aspect of dignified but undisguised 
economy which showed itself in her dress as 
well as in her limited quarters, I suspected a 
story of shipwrecked fortune, and determined to 



110 OLIVER WENDELL HOLME*. 

question our Landlady. That worthy woman 
was delighted to tell the history of her most 
distinguished boarder. Sfce was, as I had sup- 
posed, a gentlewoman whom a change of circum- 
stances had brought down from her hisfh 
estate. — Did I know the Goldenrod family ? — 
Of course I did. — Well, the lady was first 
cousin to Mrs. Midas Goldenrod. She had 
been here in her carriage to call upon her — 
not very often. — Were her rich relations kind 
and helpful to her? — Well, yes; at least they 
made her presents now and then. Three or 
four years ago they sent her a silver waiter, 
and every Christmas they sent her a bouquet — 
it must cost as much as five dollars, the Land- 
lady thought. 

"And how did the Lady receive these valu- 
able and useful things ? 

" Every Christmas she got out the silver 
waiter and borrowed a glass tumbler and filled 
it with water, and put the bouquet in it and 
set it on the waiter. It smelt sweet enough 
and looked pretty for a day or two, but the 
Landlady thought it wouldn't have hurt 'em 
if they'd sent a piece of goods for a dress, or 
at least a pocket hanclkercher or two, or some- 



FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. Ill 

thing or other that she could ' a ' made use 
of. .... 

"What did she do? — Why, she read, and 
she drew pictures, and she did needlework 
patterns, and played on an old harp she had ; 
the gilt was mostly off, but it sounded very 
sweet, and she sung to it, sometimes, those old 
songs that used to be in fashion twenty or 
thirty years ago, with words to 'em that folks 
could understand 

" Poor Lady ! She seems to me like a picture 
that has fallen face downward on the dusty 
floor. The picture never was as needful as a 
window or a door, but it was pleasant to see 
it in its place, and it would be pleasant to see 
it there again, and I for one, should be thankful 
to have the Lady restored by some turn of for- 
tune to the position from which she has been so 
cruelly cast down." 

Before the Poet closes his breakfast talk, the 
poor Lady has, through the efforts of another 
boarder, the Register of Deeds, recovered her 
property. Mrs. Midas Goldenrod makes frequent 
and longer calls — " the very moment her rela- 
tive, the Lady of our breakfast table, began to 
find herself in a streak of sunshine she came 



112 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

forward with a lighted candle to show her 
which way her path lay before her. 

"The Lady saw all this, how plainly, how pain- 
fully! yet she exercised a true charity for 
the weakness of her relative. Sensible people 
have as much consideration for the frailties of 
the rich as for those of the poor. 

" The Lady that's been so long with me is 
going to a house of her own," said the Land- 
lady, " one she has bought back again, for it 
used to belong to her folks. It's a beautiful 
house, and the sun shines in at the front win- 
dows all day long. She's going to be wealthy 
again, but it doesn't make any difference in 
her ways. I've had boarders complain when I 
was doing as well as I knowed how for them, 
but I never heerd a word from her that wasn't 
as pleasant as if she'd been talking to the Gov- 
ernor's lady." 

The strange little man, denominated " Scara- 
bee," who had grown to look so much like 
the beetles he studied ; the " Member of the 
House" with his Down East phrases; the little 
"Scheherazade" who furnishes a new story 
each week for the newspapers ; — the good look- 
ing, rosy-cheeked salesman " of very polite man- 



FURTHER ACQUAINTANCE. 113 

ners, only a little more brisk than the approved 
style of carriage permits, as one in the habit 
of springing with a certain alacrity at the call of 
a customer ; " the good old Master of Arts who 
makes so many sage remarks ; — the young 
Astronomer with nis heart confessions in the 
Wind-clouds and Star-drifts — all these are new 
acquaintances whom we are loth to part with, 
when the Landlady announces her intention of 
giving up the famous boarding-house, and the 
Poet drops the curtain. Would that the Old 
Master could yet be induced to give to the 
public those "notes and reflections and new 
suggestions " of his marvellous " interleaved vol- 
ume!" 



IU OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER XII. 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 



WHEN we come to consider Doctor Holmes 
on the poet side of his many-sided nature, 
his own words at the famous Breakfast-Table 
are vividly brought to mind : 

" The works of other men live, but their 
personality dies out of their labors ; the poet, 
who reproduces himself in his creation, as no 
other artist does or can, goes down to poster- 
ity with all his personality blended with what- 
ever is imperishable in his song 

A single lyric is enough, if one can only find 
in his soul and finish in his intellect one of 
those jewels fit to sparkle on the stretched 
forefinger of all time." 

In the poems of Doctor Holmes we are quite 
sure there arc many just such lyrics that the 
world will not willingly let die. The Last Leaf, 
The Voiceless, The Chambered Nautilus, The 



FAVOBITES OF SONG. 115 

Two Armies \ The Old Mans Dream, Under 
the Violets, Dorothy Q. — but where shall we 
stop in the long enumeration of popular favor- 
ites like these ? 

Oliver Wendell Holmes touches the heart as 
well as the intellect, and that aside from his 
power as a humorist, is one great secret of 
his success. 

Listen, for instance, to this exquisite bit : 

Yes, dear departed, cherished days 

Could Memory's hand restore 
Your Morning light, your evening rays 

From Time's gray urn once more, — 
Then might this restless heart be still, 

This straining eye might close, 
A.nd Hope her fainting pinions fold, 

While the fair phantoms rose. 

But, like a child in ocean's arms, 

We strive against the stream, 
Each moment farther from the shore 

Where life's young fountains gleam ; — 
Each moment fainter wave the fields, 

And wider rolls the sea ; 
The mist grows dark, — the sun goes down, — 

Day breaks, — and where are we ? 

Aud what a dainty touch is given to this 
Song of the Sun- Worshipper s Daughter f 



116 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, 

Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Morn 

Blushing into life new born! 
Send me violets for my hair 

And thy russet robe to wear, 
And thy ring of rosiest hue 

Set in drops of diamond dew ! 

Kiss my lips, thou Lord of light, 

Kiss my lips a soft good-night ! 
Westward sinks thy golden car; 

Leave me but the evening star 
And my solace that shall be 

Borrowing all its light from thee. 

And where will you find a more pathetic 
picture than that of the old musician in The Silent 
Melody ? 

Bring me my broken harp, he said ; 

We both are wrecks — but as ye will — 
Though all its ringing tones have fled, 
Their echoes linger round it still ; 
It had some golden strings, I know, 
But that was long — how long! — ago. 

I cannot see its tarnished gold j 

I cannot hear its vanished tone ; 
Scarce can my trembling fingers hold 
The pillared frame so long their own ; 
We both are wrecks — a while ago 
It had some silver strings, I know. 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 117 

But on them Time too long has played 

The solemn strain that knows no change, 
And where of old my fingers strayed 

The chords they find are new and strange — 
Yes; iron strings — I know — I know — 
We both are wrecks of long ago. 

With pitying smiles the broken harp is 
brought to him. Not a single string remains. 

But see! like children overjoyed, 

His fingers rambling through the void! 

They gather softly around the old musician. 

Rapt in his tuneful trance he seems; 

His fingers move ; but not a sound ! 

A silence like the song of dreams. . . . 

" There ! ye have heard the air," he cries, 

" That brought the tears from Marian's eyes ! " 

The poem closes with these fine stanzas : 

Ah, smile not at his fond conceit, 

Nor deem his fancy wrought in vain; 
To him the unreal sounds are sweet, 
No discord mars the silent strain 
Scored on life's latest, starlit page 
The voiceless melody of age. 

Sweet are the lips of all that sing, 

When Nature's music breathes unsought, 



118 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

But never yet could voice or string 
So truly shape our tenderest thought, 
As when by life's decaying fire 
Our ringers sweep the stringless lyre ! 

Though entirely different in style, Bill and 
Joe is another of those heart-reaching, tear- 
starting poems. 

Listen, for instance, to these few verses : 

Come, dear old comrade, you and I 
Will steal an hour from days gone by ; 
The shining days when life was new, 
And all was bright with morning dew, 
The lusty days of long ago 
When you were Bill and I was Joe. 

You've won the judge's ermined robe, 
You've taught your name to half the globe, 
You've sung mankind a deathless strain; 
You've made the dead past live again ; 
The world may call you what it will, 
But you and I are Joe and Bill. 

How Bill forgets his hour of pride, 
While Joe sits smiling at his side ; 
How Joe, in spite of time's disguise 
Finds the old schoolmate in his eyes, — 
Those calm, stern eyes that melt and fill, 
As Joe looks fondly up at Bill. 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 119 

Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame? 

A fitful tongue of leaping flame ; 

A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust 

That lifts a pinch of mortal dust; 

A few swift years and who can show 

Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe? 

The weary idol takes his stand, 

Holds out his bruised and aching hand, 

While gaping thousands come and go, — 

How vain it seems, his empty show ! 

Till all at once his pulses thrill : 

'Tis poor old Joe's God bless you, Bill! 

The earlier poems of Doctor Holmes are 
frequently written in the favorite measures of 
Pope and Hood. This is not at all strange 
when we remember that in the boyhood of 
Doctor Holmes these two poets were the most 
popular of all the English bards. In his later 
poems, however, we find an endless variety of 
rhythms, and the careful reader will notice in 
every instance, a wonderful adaptation of the 
various poetical forms to the particular thought 
the poet wishes to convey. 

How well Doctor Holmes understands the 
" mechanism " of verse may be seen from his 
Physiology of Versification and the Harmonies 
of Organic and Animal Life, 3. valuable article 



120 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 

published in the Boston Medical and Surgical 
Journal of January 7, 1875. 

" Respiration," he says, " has an intimate relation 
to the structure of metrical compositions, and 
the reason why octoslyllabic verse is so easy to 
read aloud is because it follows more exactly 
than any other measure the natural rhythm of 
the respiration 

" The ten syllable, or heroic line has a peculiar 
majesty from the very fact that its pronunciation 
requires a longer respiration than is ordinary. 

"The caesura, it is true, comes in at irregular 
intervals and serves as a breathing place, but 
its management requires care in reading, and 
entirely breaks up the natural rhythm of breath- 
ing. The reason why the 'common metre' of 
our hymn books and the fourteen syllable line 
of Chapman's Homer is such easy reading is 
because of the short alternate lines of six and 
eight syllables. One of the most irksome of all 
measures is the twelve-syllable line in which 
Drayton's Polyolbion is written. While the four- 
teen syllabic line can be easily divided in half 
in reading, the twelve syllable one is too much 
for one expiration and not enough for two, and 
for this reason has been avoided by poets. 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 121 

" There is, however, the personal equation to be 
taken into account. A person of quiet tempera- 
ment and ample chest may habitually breathe but 
fourteen times in a minute, and the heroic measure 
will therefore be very easy reading to him ; a nar- 
row-chested, nervous person, on the contrary, who 
breathes oftener than twenty times a minute, may 
prefer the seven-syllable verse, like that of Dyer's 
Grongar Hill, to the heroic measure, and quick- 
breathing children will recite Mother Goose melo- 
dies with delight, when long metres would weary 
and distract them. 

" Nothing in poetry or in vocal music is widely 
popular that is not calculated with strict reference 
to the respiratory function. All the early ballad 
poetry shows how instinctively the reciters accom- 
modated their rhythm to their breathing: Chevy 
Chace, or The Babes in the Wood may be taken 
as an example for verse. God save tJie King, 
which has a compass of some half a dozen notes, 
and takes one expiration, economically used, to each 
line, may be referred to as the musical illustration. 

" The unconscious adaptation of voluntary life to 
the organic rhythm is perhaps a more pervading 
fact than we have been in the habit of considering 
it. One can hardly doubt that Spenser breathed 



122 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

habitually more slowly than Prior, and that Anac- 
reon had a quicker respiration than Homer. And 
this difference, which we conjecture from their 
rhythmical instincts, if our conjecture is true, 
probably, almost certainly, characterized all their 
vital movements." 

So much for the bare vehicle of verse, 
but the poet himself, as Doctor Holmes says in 
his review of " Exotics," is a medium, a clairvoyant. 
"The will is first called in requisition to exclude 
interfering outward impressions and alien trains of 
thought. After a certain time the second state or 
adjustment of the poet's double consciousness (for 
he has two states, just as the somnambulists have) 
sets up its own automatic movement, with its spe- 
cial trains of ideas and feelings in the thinking and 
emotional centres. As soon as the fine frenzy, or 
quasi trance-state, is fairly established, the con- 
sciousness watches the torrent of thoughts and 
arrests the ones wanted, singly with their fitting 
expression, or in groups of fortunate sequences 
which he cannot better by after treatment. As the 
poetical vocabulary is limited, and its plasticity 
lends itself only to certain moulds, the mind works 
under great difficulty, at least until it has acquired 
by practice such handling of language that every 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 123 

possibility of rhythm or rhyme offers itself actually 
or potentially to the clairvoyant perception simul- 
taneously with the thought it is to embody. Thus 
poetical composition is the most intense, the most 
exciting, and therefore the most exhausting of men- 
tal exercises. It is exciting because its mental 
states are a series of revelations and surprises ; in- 
tense on account of the double strain upon the 
attention. The poet is not the same man who 
seated himself an hour ago at his desk with the 
dust-cart and the gutter, or the duck-pond and the 
hay-stack, and the barnyard fowls beneath his win- 
dow. He is in the forest with the song-birds ; he 
is on the mountain-top with the eagles. He sat 
down in rusty broadcloth, he is arrayed in the 
imperial purple of his singing robes. Let him 
alone, now, if you are wise, for you might as well 
have pushed the arm that was finishing the smile 
of a Madonna, or laid a veil before a train that had 
a queen on board, as thrust your untimely question 
on this half-cataleptic child of the Muse, who 
hardly knows whether he is in the body or out of 
the body. And do not wonder if, when the fit is 
over, he is in some respects like one who is recover- 
ing after an excess of the baser stimulants." 

As a writer of humorous poetry, it is safe to say 



124 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

that Oliver Wendell Holmes is without a peer 
The Height of the Ridiculous, The September 
Gale, The Hot Season, The Deacon s Master-piece, 
Nux Postcocnatica, The Stethoscope Song, how 
many a ''cobweb" have they shaken from the 
tired brain ! 

And where in the whole range of humorous 
literature will you find a more delightful morsel 
than the "Parting Word,' 1 that follows ? — 

I must leave thee, lady sweet ! 
Months shall waste before we meet ; 
Winds are fair and sails are spread, 
Anchors leave their ocean bed ; 
Ere this shining day grows dark, 
Skies shall guide my shoreless bark; 
Through thy tears, O lady mine, 
Read thy lover's parting line. 

When the first sad sun shall set, 
Thou shalt tear thy locks of jet; 
When the morning star shall rise 
Thou shalt wake with weeping eyes ; 
When the second sun goes down 
Thou more tranquil shalt be grown, 
Taught too well that wild despair 
Dims thine eyes, and spoils thy hair. 

All the first unquiet week 

Thou shalt wear a smileless cheek; 

In the firsl month's second half 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 125 

Thou shalt once attempt to laugh ; 
Then in Pickwick thou shalt dip, 
Lightly puckering round the lip, 
Till at last, in sorrow's spite, 
Samuel makes thee laugh outright. 

While the first seven mornings last, 
Round thy chamber bolted fast 
Many a youth shall fume and pout, 
" Hang the girl, she's always out ! " 
While the second week goes round, 
Vainly shall they sing and pound ; 
When the third week shall begin, 
" Martha, let the creature in ! " 

Now once more the flattering throng 
Round thee flock with smile and song, 
But thy lips unweaned as yet, 
Lisp, " O, how can I forget ! " 
Men and devils both contrive 
Traps for catching girls alive ; 
Eve was duped, and Helen kissed, 
How, O how can you resist ? 

First, be careful of your fan, 
Trust it not to youth or man ; 
Love has filled a pirate's sail 
Often with its perfumed gale. 
Mind your kerchief most of all, 
Fingers touch when kerchiefs fall ; 
Shorter ell than mercers clip 
Is the space from hand to lip. 



126 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Trust not such as talk in tropes 
Full of pistols, daggers, ropes ; 
All the hemp that Russia bears 
Scarce would answer lovers' prayers ; 
Never thread was spun so fine, 
Never spider stretched the line, 
Would not hold the lovers true 
That would really swing for you, 

Fiercely some shall storm and swear, 
Beating breasts in black despair ; 
Others murmur with a sigh 
You must melt or they will die ; 
Painted words on empty lies, 
Grubs with wings like butterflies ; 
Let them die, and welcome, too ; 
Pray what better could they do ? 

Fare thee well, if years efface 
From thy heart love's burning trace, 
Keep, O keep that hallowed seat 
From the tread of vulgar feet; 
If the blue lips of the sea 
Wait with icy kiss for me, 
Let not thine forget that vow, 
Sealed how often, love, as now I 

In his Mcclianism in Thought and Morals, Doctor 
Holmes reveals one of the secrets of humorous 
writing. "The poet," he says, " sits down to his 
desk with an odd conceit in his brain ; and pre- 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 127 

sently his eyes filled with tears, his thought slides 
into the minor key, and his heart is full of sad and 
plaintive melodies. Or he goes to his work, say- 
ing — 

" 'To-night I would have tears ; ' and before he 
rises from his table he has written a burlesque, 
such as he might think fit to send to one of the 
comic papers, if these were not so commonly 
cemeteries of hilarity interspersed with cenotaphs 
of wit and humor. These strange hysterics of the 
intelligence which make us pass from weeping to 
laughter, and from laughter back again to weeping, 
must be familiar to every impressible nature ; and 
all this is as automatic, involuntary, as entirely self- 
evolved by a hidden, organic process, as are the 
changing moods of the laughing and crying woman. 
The poet always recognizes a dictation ab extra; 
and we hardly think it a figure of speech when we 
talk of his inspiration." 

Of Doctor Holmes' inimitable vers a" occasion we 
select the following : 

At the reception given to Harriet Beecher 
Stowe on her seventieth birthday, at Governor 
Claflin's beautiful summer residence in Newton- 
ville, Doctor Holmes read the following witty 
and characteristic poem : 



128 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

If every tongue that speaks her praise 
For whom I shape my tinkling phrase 

Were summoned to the table, 
The vocal chorus that would meet 
Of mingling accents harsh or sweet 
From every land and tribe would beat 

The polyglots of Babel. 

Briton and Frenchman. Swede and Dane, 
Turk, Spaniard, Tartar of Ukraine, 

Hidalgo, Cossack, Cadi, 
High Dutchman and Low Dutchman, too, 
The Russian serf, the Polish Jew, 
Arab, Armenian and Mantchoo 

Would shout, " We know the lady." 

Know her ! Who knows not Uncle Tom 
And her he learned his gospel from 

Has never heard of Moses ; 
Full well the brave black hand we know 
That gave to freedom's grasp the hoe 
That killed the weed that used to grow 

Among the Southern roses. 

When Archimedes, long ago, 

Spoke out so grandly " dos pou sto,— 

Give me a place to stand on, 
I'll move your planet for you, now," 
He little dreamed or fancied how 
The sto at last should find its pou 

For woman's faith to land on. 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 129 

Her lever was the wand of art, 
Her fulcrum was the human heart 

Whence all unfailing aid is ; 
She moved the earth ! its thunders pealed, 
Its mountains shook, its temples reeled, 
The blood -red fountains were unsealed, 

And Moloch sunk to Hades. 

All through the conflict, up and down 
Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown, 

One ghost, one form ideal, 
And which was false and which was true. 
And which was mightier of the two, 
The wisest sibyl never knew, 

For both alike were real. 

Sister, the holy maid does well 

Who counts her beads in convent cell, 

Where pale devotion lingers ; 
But she who serves the sufferer's needs, 
Whose prayers are spelt in loving deeds 
May trust the Lord will count her beads 

As well as human fingers. 

When Truth herself was Slavery's slave 
Thy hand the prisoned suppliant gave 

The rainbow wings of fiction. 
And Truth who soared descends to-day 
Bearing an angel's wreath away, 
Its lilies at thy feet to lay 

With heaven's own benediction. 



130 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 

The following poem was read by Doctor 
Holmes at the Unitarian Festival, June 2, 
1882. 

The waves upbuild the wasting shore : 

Where mountains towered the billows sweep : 
Yet still their borrowed spoils restore 

And raise new empires from the deep. 
So, while the floods of thought lay waste 

The old domain of chartered creeds, 
The heaven-appointed tides will haste 

To shape new homes for human needs. 
Be ours to mark with hearts unchilled 

The change an outworn age deplores ; 
The legend sinks, but Faith shall build 

A fairer throne on new-found shores, 
The star shall glow in western skies, 

That shone o'er Bethlehem's hallowed shrine, 
And once again the temple rise 

That crowned the rock of Palestine. 
Not when the wondering shepherds bowed 

Did angels sing their latest song, 
Nor yet to Israel's kneeling crowd 

Did heaven's one sacred dome belong — 
Let priest and prophet have their dues, 

The Levite counts but half a man, 
Whose proud "salvation of the Jews" 

Shuts out the good Samaritan ! 
Though scattered far the flock may stray, 

I lis own the shepherd still shall claim, — 
The saints who never learned to pray, — 

The friends who never spoke his name. 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 131 

Dear Master, while we hear thy voice, 
That says, " The truth shall make you free," 

Thy servant still, by loving choice, 
O keep us faithful unto Thee ! 

Doctor Holmes being unable to attend the 
annual reunion of the Harvard Club in New- 
York City, February 21, 1882, sent the fol- 
lowing letter and sonnet which were read at 
the banquet : 

Dear Brothers Alumni : 

As I am obliged to deny myself the plea- 
sure of being with you, I do not feel at lib- 
erty to ask many minutes of your time and 
attention. I have compressed into the limits 
of a sonnet the feelings I am sure we all 
share that, besides the roof that shelters us 
we have need of some wider house where we 
can visit and find ourselves in a more ex- 
tended circle of sympathy than the narrow 
ring of a family, and nowhere can we seek a 
truer and purer bond of fellowship than under 
the benignant smile of our Alma Mater. Let 
me thank you for the kindness which has signi- 
fied to me that I should be welcome at your 
festival. 



I 



132 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

In all the rewards of a literary life none 
is more precious than the kindly recog- 
nition of those who have clung to the heart 
of the same nursing mother, and will always 
flee to each other in the widest distances of 
space, and let us hope in those unbounded 
realms in which we may not utterly forget 
our earthly pilgrimage and its dear compan- 
ions. 

Very sincerely yours, 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
sonnet. 

Yes, home is sweet ! and yet we needs must sigh, 
Restless until our longing souls have found 
Some realm beyond the fireside's narrow bound, 

Where slippered ease and sleepy comfort lie, 

Some fair ideal form that cannot die, 

l]y age dismantled and by change uncrowned, 
Else life creeps circling in the self-same round, 

And the low ceiling hides the lofty sky. 

Ah, then to thee our truant hearts return, 
Dear mother, Alma, Casta — spotless, kind! 
Thy sacred walls a larger home we find, 

And still for thee thy wandering children yearn, 

While with undying fires thine altars burn, 
Where all our holiest memories rest enshrined. 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 13? 

POEM READ BY DOCTOR HOLMES AT THE WHIT 
TIER CELEBRATION. 

I believe that the copies of verses I've spun, 
Like Scheherazade's tales, are a thousand and one, 
You remember the story — those mornings in bed — 
'Twas the turn of a copper — a tale or a head. 

A doom like Scheherazade's falls upon me 
In a mandate as stern as the Sultan's decree ; 
I'm a florist in verse, and what would people say 
If I came to a banquet without my bouquet ? 

It is trying, no doubt, when the company knows 
Just the look and the smell of each lily and rose, 
The green of each leaf in the sprigs that I bring, 
And the shape of the bunch and the knot of the string. 

Yes, 'the style is the man,' and the nib of one's pen 
Makes the same mark at twenty, and threescore and ten ; 
It is so in all matters, if truth may be told ; 
Let one look at the cast he can tell you the mould. 

How we all know each other ! No use in disguise ; 
Through the holes in the mask comes the flash of the ey'**.; 
"We can tell by his — somewhat — each one of our tribe, 
As we know the old hat which we cannot describe. 

Though in Hebrew, in Sanscrit, in Choctaw, you write, 
Sweet singer who gave us the Voices of Night, 
Though in buskin or slipper your song may be shod, 
Or the velvety verse that Evangeline trod, 



134 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

We shall say, 'You can't cheat us — we know it is you — 
There is one voice like that, but there cannot be two, 
Maestro, whose chant like the dulcimer rings; 
And the woods will be hushed when the nightingale sings. 

And he, so serene, so majestic, so true, 

Whose temple hypasthral the planets shine through, 

Let us catch but five words from that mystical pen 

We should know our one sage from all children of men. 

And* he whose bright image no distance can dim, 
Through a hundred disguises we can't mistake him, 
Whose play is all earnest, whose wit is the edge 
(With a beetle behind) of a sham-splitting wedge. 

Do you know whom we send you, Hidalgos of Spain ? 
Do you know your old friends when you see them again ? 
Hosea was Sancho ! you Dons of Madrid, 

But Sancho that wielded the lance of the Cid ! 

And the wood-thrush of Essex — you know whom I mean, 
Whose song echoes round us when he sits unseen, 
Whose heart-throbs of verse through our memories thrill 
Like a breath from the wood, like a breeze from the hill. 

So fervid, so simple, so loving, so pure, 

We hear but one strain and our verdict is sure — 

Thee cannot elude us — no further we search — 

'Tis Holy George Herbert cut loose from his church I 

We think it the voice of a cherub that sings — 
Alas I we remember that angels have wings — 



FAVORITES OF SONG. 135 

What story is this of the day of his birth ? 

Let him live to a hundred ! we want him on earth 1 

One life has been paid him ( in gold ) by the sun ; 
One account has been squared and another begun ; 
But he never will die if he lingers below 
Till we've paid him in love half the balance we owe! 



136 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER XIII 



THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 



WHAT decided me," says Doctor Holmes, 
" to give up Law and apply myself to Medi- 
cine, I can hardly say, but I had from the first looked 
upon my law studies as an experiment. At any 
rate, I made the change, and soon found myself in- 
troduced to new scenes and new companionships. 
" I can scarcely credit my memory when I recall 
the first impressions produced upon me by sights 
afterwards become so familiar that they could no 
more disturb a pulse-beat than the commonest of 
every-day experiences. The skeleton, hung aloft 
like a gibbeted crimina], looked grimly at me as I 
entered the room devoted to the students of the 
school I had joined, just as the fieshless figure of 
Time, with the hour-glass and scythe, used to glare 
upon me in my childhood from the New England 
Primer. The white faces in the beds at the Hos- 
pital found their reflection in my own cheeks which 



THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 137 

lost their color as I looked upon them. All this 
had to pass away in a little time ; I had chosen my 
profession, and must meet all its aspects until they 
lost their power over my sensibility 

" After attending two courses of lectures in the 
School of the University, I went to Europe to con- 
tinue my studies. I can hardly believe my own 
memory when I recall the old practitioners and 
professors who were still going round the hospitals 
when I mingled with the train of students in the 
Ecole de Medicine." 

Of the famous Baron Boyer, author of a nine- 
volumed book on surgery, Doctor Holmes says, " I 
never saw him do more than look as if he wanted 
to cut a good collop out of a patient he was examin- 
ing." Baron Larrey, the favorite surgeon of Na- 
poleon, he describes as a short, square, substantial 
man, with iron-gray hair, red face, and white apron. 
To go round the Hotel des Invalides with Larrey 
was to live over the campaign of Napoleon, to look 
on the sun of Austerlitz, to hear the cannon of 
Marengo, to struggle through the icy waters of the 
Beresina, to shiver in the snows of the Russian 
retreat, and to gaze through the battle smoke upon 
the last charge of the red lancers on the redder 
field of Waterloo. 



138 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Then there was Baron Dupuytren, "ce grand 
hotnme de lautre cote de la riviere, — with his high, 
full-doomed head and oracular utterances; Lis- 
france, the great drawer of blood and hewer of 
members ; Velpeau, who, coming to Paris in wooden 
shoes, and starving, almost, at first, raised himself 
to great eminence as surgeon and author ; Brous^ 
sais, the knotty-featured, savage old man who re- 
minded one of a volcano, which had well-nigh used 
up its fire and brimstone, and Gabriel Audral, 
the rapid, fluent, fervid and imaginative speaker. 

"The object of our reverence, however, I 
might almost say idolatry," adds Doctor Holmes, 
" was Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, a tall, 
rather spare, dignified personage, of serene and 
grave aspect, but with a pleasant smile and 
kindly voice for the student with whom he 
came into personal relations. 

" If I summed up the lessons of Louis in 
two expressions, they would be these : First, always 
make sure that you form a distinct and clear 
idea of the matter you are considering. Sec- 
ond, always avoid vague approximations where 
exact estimates are possible 

" Yes, as I say, I look back on the long hours of 
the many days I spent in the wards and in 



THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 139 

the autopsy room of La Pitie, where Louis was 
one of the attending physicians — yes, Louis 
did a great work for practical medicine. Mod- 
est in the presence of nature, fearless in the 
face of authority, unwearying in the pursuit of 
truth, he was a man whom any student might 
be happy and proud to claim as his teacher 
and his friend. And yet, as I look back on 
the days when I followed his teachings, I feel 
that I gave myself up too exclusively to his 
methods of thought and study. There is one 
part of their business that certain medical prac- 
titioners are too apt to forget ; namely, that 
what they should most of all try to do is to 
ward off disease, to alleviate suffering, to pre- 
serve life, or at least to prolong it if possible. 
It is not of the slightest interest to the patient 
to know whether three or three and a quarter 
inches of his lungs are hepatized. His mind 
is not occupied with thinking of the curious 
problems which are to be solved by his own 
autopsy, whether this or that strand of the 
spinal marrow is the seat of this or that form 
of degeneration. He wants something to re- 
lieve his pain, to mitigate the anguish of 
dyspnaea, to bring back motion and sensibility 



140 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

to the dead limb, to still the tortures of neu- 
ralgia. What is it to him that you can local- 
ize and name by some uncouth term, the dis- 
ease which you could not prevent and which 
you can not cure ? an old woman who knows 
how to make a poultice and how to put it 
on, and does it tuto, cito, jucuude, just when 
and where it is wanted, is better — a thousand 
times better in many cases — than a staring 
pathologist who explores and thumps and doubts 
and guesses and tells his patient he will be 
better to-morrow, and so goes home to tumble 
his books over and make out a diagnosis. 

"But in those days I, like most of my fellow stu- 
dents, was thinking much more of ' science ' than 
of practical medicine, and I believe if we had not 
clung so closely to the skirts of Louis, and had 
followed some of the courses of men like Rousseau, 
— therapeutists, who gave special attention to 
curative methods, and not chiefly to diagnosis — it 
would have been better for me and others. One 
thing, at any rate, we did learn in the wards of 
Louis. We learned that a very large proportion of 
diseases get well of themselves, without any special 
medication — the great fact formulated, enforced 
and popularized by Doctor Jacob Bigelow." 



THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 141 

It is well known that Doctor Holmes detests the 
habit of- drugging practised by so many physicians 
of the " old school," and in his address before the 
Massachusetts Medical Society, entitled Currents 
and Counter Currents in Medical Science, he 
makes a severe attack upon the inordinate use of 
medicines. 

"What is the honest truth," he says at another 
time, " about the medical art ? By far the largest 
number of diseases which physicians are called to 
treat will get well at any rate, even in spite of rea- 
sonably bad treatment. Of the other fraction, a 
certain number will inevitably die, whatever is 
done: there remains a small margin of cases where 
the life of the patient depends on the skill of the 
physician Drugs now and then save life ; they 
often shorten disease and remove symptoms ; but 
they are second in importance to food, air, tempera- 
ture, and the other hygienic influences. That was 
a shrewd trick of Alexander's physician on the occa- 
sion of his attack after bathing. He asked three 
days to prepare his medicine. Time is the great 
physician as well as the great consoler. Sensible 
men in all ages have trusted most to nature." 

Of quacks and other humbugs, Doctor Holmes 
had an undisguised, wholesome contempt. 



142 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

" Shall we try," he says, " the medicines adver- 
tised with the certificates of justices of the peace, of 
clergymen, or even members of Congress ? Cer- 
tainly, it may be answered, any one of them which 
makes a good case for itself. But the difficulty is, 
that the whole class of commercial remedies are 
shown by long experience, with the rarest excep- 
tions, to be very sovereign cures for empty pockets, 
and of no peculiar efficacy for anything else. You 
may be well assured that if any really convincing 
evidence was brought forward in behalf of the most 
vulgar nostrum, the chemists would go at once to 
work to analyze it, the physiologists to experiment 
with it, and the young doctors would all be trying 
it on their own bodies, if not on their patients. But 
we do not think it worth while, as a general rule, to 
send a Cheap Jack's gilt chains and lockets to be 
tested for gold. We know they are made to sell, 
and so with the pills and potions. 
Think how rapidly any real discovery is appro- 
priated and comes into universal use. Take anaes- 
thetics, take the use of bromide of potassium, and 
see how easily they obtained acceptance. If you 
are disposed to think any of the fancy systems has 
brought forward any new remedy of value which 
the medical profession has been slow to accept, 



THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 143 

ask any fancy practitioner to name it. Let him 
name one, — the best his system claims, — not 
a hundred, but one. A single new, efficient, 
trustworthy remedy which the medical profes- 
sion can test as they are ready to test 
before any scientific tribunal, opium, quinine, 
ether, the bromide of potassium. There is no 
such remedy on which any of the fancy prac- 
titioners dare stake his reputation. If there 
were, it would long ago have been accepted, 
though it had been flowers of brimstone from 
the borders of Styx or Cocytus." 

Homoeopathy is classed by Doctor Holmes among 
such " Kindred Delusions " as the Royal Cure for 
the King's Evil, the Weapon Ointment, the 
Sympathetic Powder, the Tar-water mania of 
Bishop Berkeley, and the Metallic Tractors, or 
Perkinsism. 

In making a direct attack upon the preten- 
tions of Homoeopathy, Doctor Holmes declares 
at the outset that he shall treat it not by 
ridicule, but by argument ; with great freedom, 
but with good temper and in peaceable lan- 
guage. 

Similia similibus curantur. Like cures like, 
is one of the fundamental principles of Homce- 



144 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

opathy, and " improbable though it may seem 
to some," says Doctor Holmes with his usual im- 
partial fairness, "there is no essential absurdity 
involved in the proposition that diseases yield 
to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. 
There are, on the other hand, some analogies 
which lend a degree of plausibility to the state- 
ment. There are well-ascertained facts, known 
from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that 
under certain circumstances, the very medicine 
which from its known effects, one would ex- 
pect to aggravate the disease, may contribute 
to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, 
in the most general way, to the case in which 
the spontaneous efforts of an over-tasked stom- 
ach are quieted by the agency of a drug 
which that organ refuses to entertain upon any 
terms. But that every cure ever performed by 
medicine should have been founded upon this 
principle, although without the knowledge of a 
physician, that the Homoeopathy axiom is, as 
Hahnemann asserts, " the sole law of nature in 
therapeutics," a law of which nothing more than 
a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the 
innumerable host of medical observers, is a dog- 
ma of such sweeping extent and pregnant nov- 



THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 145 

elty, that it demands a corresponding breath 
and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its 
vast pretensions." 

Among the many facts of which great use 
has been made by the Homceopathists, is that 
found in the precept given for the treatment 
of parts which have been frozen, by friction 
with snow, etc. 

" But," says Doctor Holmes, " we deceive 
ourselves by names, if we suppose the frozen 
part to be treated by cold, and not by heat. 
The snow may even be actually warmer than 
the part to which it is applied. But even if it 
were at the same temperature when applied, 
it never did and never could do the least good 
to a frozen part, except as a mode of regulat- 
ing the application of what ? of heat. But the 
heat must be applied gradually, just as food 
must be given a little at a time to those per- 
ishing with hunger. If the patient were 
brought into a warm room, heat would be ap- 
plied very rapidly, were not something inter- 
posed to prevent this, and allow its gradual 
admission. Snow or iced water is exactly what 
is wanted ; it is not cold to the part ; it is 
very possibly warm, on the contrary, for these 



146 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

terms are relative, and if it does not melt and 
let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part 
will remain frozen up until doomsday. Now 
the treatment of a frozen limb by heat, in 
large or small quantities, is not Homoeopathy." 
Another supposed illustration of the Homoeo- 
pathic law is the alleged successful management 
of burns, by holding them to the fire. "This 
is a popular mode of treating those burns which 
are of too little consequence to require any 
more efficacious remedy, and would inevitably 
get well of themselves, without any trouble 
being bestowed upon them. It produces a most 
acute pain in the part, which is followed by 
some loss of sensibility, as happens with the eye 
after exposure to strong light, and the ear 
after being subjected to very intense sounds. 
This is all it is capable of doing, and all fur- 
ther notions of its efficacy must be attributed 
merely to the vulgar love of paradox. If this 
example affords any comfort to the Homceopa- 
'hist, it seems as cruel to deprive him of it 
ji>S it would be to convince the mistress of the 
smoke-jack or the flatiron that the fire does 
not literally draw the fire out, which is her 
hypothesis. 



TEE MAN OF SCIENCE. 147 

" But if it were true that frost-bites were 
cured by cold and burns by heat, it would be 
subversive, so far as it went, of the great 
principle of Homoeopathy. For you will re- 
member that this principle is that Like cures 
Like, and not that Same cures Same; that 
there is resemblance and not identity between 
the symptoms of the disease and those pro- 
duced by the drug which cures it, and none 
have been readier to insist upon this distinc- 
tion than the Homceopathists themselves. For 
if Same cures Same, then every poison must 
be its own antidote, — which is neither a part 
of their theory nor their so-called experience. 
They have been asked often enough, why it 
was that arsenic could not cure the mischief 
which arsenic had caused, and why the infec- 
tious cause of small-pox did not remedy the 
disease it had produced, and then they were 
ready enough to see the distinction I have 
pointed out. " O no ! it was not the hair of 
the same dog, but only of one very much like 
him!" 

The belief in and employment of the " In- 
finitesimal closes," Doctor Holmes handles with 
the same fairness and acumen ; but the absurd 



148 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

idea affirmed by Hahnemann that Psora is the 
cause of the great majority of chronic diseases, 
he treats as it deserves, with unqualified con- 
tempt. 

In conclusion, he says, "As one humble 
member of a profession which for more than 
two thousand years has devoted itself to the 
pursuit of the best earthly interests of man- 
kind always assailed and insulted from without 
by such as are ignorant of its infinite per- 
plexities and labors, always striving in unequal 
contest with the hundred armed giants who 
walk in the noonday and sleep not in the 
midnight, yet still toiling not merely for itself 
and the present moment, but for the race 
and the future, I have lifted up my voice 
against this lifeless delusion, rolling its shape- 
less bulk into the path of a noble science it 
is too weak to strike or to injure." 

Upon the contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, 
Doctor Holmes wrote an able treatise some 
forty years ago. This was reprinted with some 
additions, in 1855, and in an introductory note 
which accompanies the still later addition(i 883), 
Doctor Holmes says, " The subject of this Paper 
has the same profound interest for me at the 



THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 149 

present morrent as it had when I was first 
collecting the terrible evidence out of which, 
as it seems to me, the commonest exercise of 
reason could not help shaping the truth it 
involved. It is not merely on account of the 
bearing of the question — if there is a ques- 
tion — on all that is most sacred in human life 
and happiness that the subject cannot lose its 
interest. It is because it seems evident that 
a fair statement of the facts must produce 
its proportion of well-constituted and unpreju- 
diced minds." 

The essay, a most valuable one, is republished 
without the change of a word or syllable, as 
the author upon reviewing finds that it antici- 
pates and eliminates those secondary questions 
which cannot be for a moment entertained 
until the one great point of fact is peremp- 
torily settled. 

There are but very few subjects, indeed, in 
medical science, that Doctor Holmes has not 
investigated, and investigated, too, most thor- 
oughly. 

In his article on " Reflex Vision," published in 
Volume IV. of the Proceedings of the American 
Academy, will be found a very interesting ac- 



150 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

count of his experiments in optics. One, indeed, 
that will both interest and instruct. 

To him, as is well known, we are indebted 
for numerous improvements in the stereoscope ; 
and in microscopes also, he has done some 
original and important work. 

Said an admirer of Doctor Holmes in 
referring to his career as a medical professor : 

" He always makes people attentive, and I 
have been told that there is no professor whom 
the students so much like to listen to. In one 
of his books he says that every one of us is 
three persons, and I think that if the state- 
ment is true in regard to ordinary men and 
women, Doctor Holmes himself is at least half 
a dozen persons. He lectures so well on 
anatomy that his students never suspect him 
to be a poet, and he writes verses so well 
that most people do not suspect him of being 
an authority among scientific men. Though he 
illustrates his medical lectures by quotations of 
the most appropriate and interesting sort, from 
a wonderful variety of authors, he has never 
been known to refer to his own writings in 
that way." 

In celebrating the silver anniversary year of 



THE MAN OF SCIENCE. 15^ 

his wedding with the Muse of the monthlies — 
meaning his reappearance in the Atlantic — he 
observed that during the larger part of his 
absence, his time had been in a great meas- 
ure occupied with other duties. " I never for- 
got the advice of Coleridge," he said, " that 
a literary man should have a regular calling. 
I may say, in passing, that I have often given 
the advice to others, and too often wished that 
I could supplement it with the words, "And 
confine himself to it.'" 



152 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 

AS the seventieth birthday of Doctor 
Holmes drew near, the publishers of 
the Atlantic Monthly resolved to give a "Break- 
fast" in his honor. The twenty-ninth of August, 
1879, was, of course, the true anniversary, but 
knowing it would be difficult to bring together 
at that season of the year the friends and lit- 
erary associates of Doctor Holmes, Mr. Hough- 
ton decided to postpone the invitations until the 
thirteenth of November. Upon that day a bril- 
liant company assembled at noon in the spa- 
cious parlors of the Hotel Brunswick, in Bos- 
ton. 

Doctor Holmes and his daughter, Mrs. Sar- 
gent, received the guests, who numbered in all 
about one hundred. Mrs. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Ralph Waldo 
Emerson and John G. Whittier assisted in this 



THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 153 

ceremony, and after a couple of hours spent in 
sparkling converse, the company adjourned to 
the dining-room, where a sumptuous " Break- 
last " was served to the "Autocrat" and his 
friends. 

At the six tables were seated writers of 
eminence in every department of literature. 
Grace was said by the Rev. Phillips Brooks, 
D. D., and after the cloth was removed., Mr. 
H. O. Houghton introduced the guest of the 
day in a few happily-chosen words. 

The company then rose and drank the health 
of the poet, after which Doctor Holmes read 
the following beautiful poem : 

THE IRON GATE. 

Where is the patriarch you are kindly greeting? 

Xot unfamiliar to my ear his name, 
Not yet unknown to many a joyous meeting 

In days long vanished, — is he still the same, 

Or changed by years forgotten and forgetting, 

Dull-eared, dim-sighted, slow of speech and thought, 

Still o'er the sad, degenerate present fretting, 
Where all goes wrong and nothing as it ought ? 

Old age, the gray-beard! Well, indeed. I know him, — 
Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey ; 



154 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 

In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem, 

Oft have I met him from my earliest day. 

In my old /Esop, toiling with his bundle, — 
His load of sticks, — politely asking Death, 

Who comes when called for,— would he lug or trundle 
His fagot for him ? — he was scant of breath. 

And sad " Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher," 

Has he not stamped the image on my soul, 

In that last chapter, where the worn-out Teacher 
Sighs o'er the loosened cord, the broken bowl? 

Yes, long, indeed, I've known him at a distance, 
And now my lifted door-latch shows him here ; 

I take his shrivelled hand without resistance, 
And find him smiling as his step draws near. 

What though of gilded baubles he bereaves us, 
Dear to the heart of youth, to manhood's prime, 

Think of the calm he brings, the wealth he leaves us, 
The hoarded spoils, the legacies of time ! 

Altars once flaming, still with incense fragrant, 

Passion's uneasy nurslings rocked asleep, 
Hope's anchor faster, wild desire less vagrant, 

Life's flow less noisy, but the stream h ow deep ! 

Still as the silver cord gets worn and slender, 
Its lightened task-work tugs with lessening strain, 

Hands get more helpful, voices grown more tender, 
Soothe with their softened tones the slumberous brain. 



THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 15i 

Youth longs and manhood strives, but age remembers, 

Sits by the raked-up ashes of the past, 
Spreads' its thin hands above the whitening embers 

That warm its creeping life-blood till the last. 

Dear to its heart is every loving token 

That comes unbidden ere its pulse grows cold, 

Ere the last lingering ties of life are broken, 
Its labors ended, and its story told. 

Ah, while around us rosy youth rejoices, 

For us the sorrow-laden breezes sigh, 
And through the chorus of its jocund voices 

Throbs the sharp note of misery's hopeless cry. 

As on the gauzy wings of fancy flying 

From some far orb I track our watery sphere, 

Home of the struggling, suffering, doubting, dying, 
The silvered globule seems a glistening tear. 

But Nature lends her mirror of illusion 

To win from saddening scenes our age-dimmed eyes, 
And misty day-dreams blend in sweet confusion 

The wintery landscape and the summer skies. 

So when the iron portal shuts behind us, 
And life forgets us in its noise and whirl, 

Visions that shunned the glaring noonday find us, 
And glimmering starlight shows the gates of pearl. 

I come not here your morning hour to sadden 
A limping pilgrim leaning on his staff, — 



156 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden 
This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh. 

If word of mine another's gloom has brightened, 
Through my dumb lips the heaven-sent message came ; 

If hand of mine another's task has lightened, 
It felt the guidance that it dares not claim. 

But, O my gentle sisters, O my brothers, 

These thick-sown snow-flakes hint of toil's release ; 

These feebler pulses bid me leave to others 

The tasks once welcome; evening asks for peace. 

Time claims his tribute ; silence now is golden ; 

Let me not vex the too long suffering lyre ; 
Though to your love untiring still beholden, 

The curfew tells me — cover up the fire. 

And now with grateful smile and accents cheerful. 
And warmer heart than look or word can tell, 

In simplest phrase — these traitorous eyes are tearful — 
Thanks, Brothers, Sisters, — Children, and farewell! 

After the reading of the poem, the follow- 
ing reminiscence from Doctor Holmes' pen, was 
read by Mr. Houghton : — 

"The establishment of the Atlantic Monthly 
was due to the liberal enterprise of the then 
flourishing firm of Phillips & Sampson. Mr. 
Phillips, more especially, was most active and 
sanguine. The publishers were fortunate enough 



THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 157 

to secure the services of Mr. Lowell as editor. 
Mr. Lowell had a fancy that I could be use- 
ful as a contributor, and woke me from a kind 
of literary lethargy in which I was half slum- 
bering, to call me to active service. Remem- 
bering some crude contributions of mine to an 
old magazine, it occurred to me that their title 
might serve for some fresh papers, and so I 
sat down and wrote off what came into my 
head under the title The Autocrat of the Break- 
fast-Table. This series of papers was not the 
result of an express premeditation, but was, as 
I may say, dipped from the running stream of 
my thoughts. Its very kind reception encour- 
aged me, and you know the consequences, 
which have lasted from that day to this. 

" But what I want especially to say here is, 
that I owe the impulse which started my second 
growth, to the urgent hint of my friend Mr. 
Lowell, and that you have him to thank, not 
only for his own noble contributions to our 
literature, but for the spur which moved me 
to action, to which you owe any pleasure I 
may have given, and I am indebted for the 
crowning happiness of this occasion. His 
absence I most deeply regret for your and my 



158 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

own sake, while I congratulate the country to 
which in his eminent station he is devoting 
his services." 

As Mr. Whittier had been obliged to leave 
the company before this, Mr. James T. Fields 
read his fine poem entitled " Our Autocrat," 
from which we quote the last verses : 

What shapes and fancies, grave or gay, 

Before us at his bidding come ! 
The Treadmill tramp, the " One Hoss Shay," 

The dumb despair of Elsie's doom! 

The tale of Aris and the Maid, 
The plea for lips that cannot speak, 

The holy kiss that Iris laid 

On Little Boston's pallid cheek f 

Long may he live to sing for us 
His sweetest songs at evening time, 

And like his Chambered Nautilus 
To holier heights of beauty climb ! 

Though now unnumbered guests surround 

The table that he rules at will, 
Its Autocrat, however crowned, 

Is but our friend and comrade still. 

The world may keep his honored name, 
The wealth of all his varied powers; 

A stronger claim has love than fame 
And he himself is only ours I 



THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 159 

Mr. W. D. Howells then took the chair and 
was introduced to the company as the repre- 
sentative of the " mythical editor." 

In his remarks, Mr. Howells paid the fol- 
lowing tribute to the Autocrat : 

" The fact is known to you all, and I will 
not insist upon it, but it was Oliver Wendell 
Holmes who not only named, but who made 
the Atlantic. How did he do this ? Oh, very 
simply ! He merely invented a new kind of 
literature, something so beautiful and rare and 
fine that while you were trying to determine 
its character as monologue or colloquy, prose 
or poetry, philosophy or humor, it was grad- 
ually penetrating your consciousness with a 
sense that the best of all these had been fused 
in one — a perfect form, an exquisite wisdom, 
an unsurpassable grace. This, and much more 
than any poor words of mine can say, was 
the Autocrat, followed by the Professor, and 
then by the Poet, at the same Breakfast-Table. 
We pledge him by all these names to-day, 
not only with the wine in our cups, but with 
the pride and love in our hearts, where we 
have enshrined him immortally young, in spite 
of the birthdays that come and go, and where 



160 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

we defy the future that lies in wait for our 
precious things, to know his quality better, or 
value his genius more highly than we." 

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe was then called upon 
to respond to the toast, " The girls we have 
not left behind us," and after a few words in 
reply, she read a fine poem in honor of the 
illustrious guest. 

Charles Dudley Warner was then introduced, 
and after a short speech, read a poem by H. 
H., "To Oliver Wendell Holmes, on his seventieth 
birthday." In these charming lines almost every 
poem of Doctor Holmes is mentioned with rare 
tact and skill. 

At the close of the poem, President Eliot of 
Harvard, rose and said : 

" It seems to me that it is my duty to 
remind all these poets, essayists and story-tellers 
who are gathered here, that the main work of 
our friend's life has been of an altogether dif- 
ferent nature. I know him as the professor of 
anatomy and physiology in the Medical School 
of Harvard University for the last thirty-two 
years, and I know him to-day as one of the 
most active and hard-working of our lecturers. 
Some of you gentlemen, I observe, are lecturers 



THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 161 

by profession, at least during the winter months. 
Doctor -Holmes delivers four lectures every 
week for eight months of the year. I am sure 
the lecturers by profession will understand that 
this task requires an extraordinary amount of 
mental and physical vigor. And I congratulate 
our friend on the weekly demonstration of that 
vigor which he gives in our medical school. 
Most of you have perhaps the impression that 
Doctor Holmes chiefly enjoys a pretty couplet, 
a beautiful verse, an elegant sentence. It has 
fallen to me to observe that he has other 
great enjoyments. I never heard any other 
mortal exhibit such enthusiasm over an elegant 
dissection. And perhaps you think it is the 
pen with which Doctor Holmes is chiefly 
skilful. I assure you that he is equally skilful 
with scalpel and with microscope. And I think 
that none of us can understand the meaning: 
and scope of Doctor Holmes' writing, unless 
we have observed that the daily work of his 
life has been to study and teach a natural 
science, the noble science of anatomy. It is 
his to know with absolute exactness the form 
of every bone in this wonderful body of ours, 
the course of every artery, and vein, and nerve, 



162 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

the form and function of every muscle , and 
not only to know it, but to describe it with 
a fascinating precision and enthusiasm. When 
I read his writings I find the traces of this 
life-work of his on every page. There are 
three thousand men scattered through New 
England at this moment who will remember 
Doctor Holmes through their lives, and transmit 
to their children the memory of him. as student 
and teacher of exact science. And let us honor 
him to-day, not forgetting — they can never be 
forgotten — his poems and essays, as a noble 
representative of the profession of the scientific 
student and teacher." 

Mr. S. L. Clemen* ( Mark Twain ) followed 
President Eliot. 

"I would have travelled,' 1 he began, " a much 
greater distance than I have come to witness 
the paying of honors to Doctor Holmes, for 
my feeling toward him has always been one 
of peculiar warmth. When one receives a let- 
ter from a great man lor the first time in 
his life, it is a large event to him, as all of 
you know by your own experience. Well, the 
first great man who ever wrote me a letter 
was our guest — Oliver Wendell Holmes. He 



THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 163 

was also the first great literary man I ever 
stole anything from, and that is how I came 
to write to him and he to me. When my 
first book was new, a friend of mine said, 
' The dedication is very neat.' ' Yes,' I said, ' I 
thought it was.' My friend said, ' I always ad- 
mired it even before I saw it in The Innocents 
Abroad' I naturally said, ' What do you 
mean ? Where did you ever see it before ? ' 
1 Well, I saw it some years ago, as Doctor 
Holmes' dedication to his Songs in Many Keys' 
Of course my first impulse was to prepare 
this man's remains for burial, but upon reflec- 
tion I said I would reprieve him for a mo- 
ment or two and give him a chance to prove 
his assertion if he could. We stepped into a 
bookstore and he did prove it. I had really 
stolen that dedication almost word for word. 
I could not imagine how this curious thing 
happened, for I knew one thing for a dead 
certainty — that a certain amount of pride 
always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, 
and that this pride protects a man from 
deliberately stealing other people's ideas. That 
is what a teaspoonful of brains will do for a 
man, and admirers had often told me I had 



164 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

nearly a basketful, though they were rather 
reserved as to the size of the basket. How- 
ever, I thought the thing out and solved the 
mystery. Two years before I had been laid up 
a couple of weeks in the Sandwich Islands, 
and had read and re-read Doctor Holmes's 
poems till my mental reservoir was filled with 
them to the brim. The dedication lay on top 
and handy, so by and by I unconsciously 
stole it. Perhaps I unconsciously stole the 
rest of the volume, too, for many people have 
told me that my book was pretty poetical in 
one way or another. Well, of course I wrote 
Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn't meant 
to steal, and he wrote back and said in the 
kindest way that it was all right and no 
harm done ; and added that he believed we 
all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in 
reading and hearing, imagining they were 
original with ourselves. He stated a truth 
and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved 
over mv sore spot so gently and so healingly 
that I was rather glad I had committed the 
crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterward 
called on him and told him to make perfectly 
free with any ideas of mine that struck him 






THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 165 

as being good protoplasm for poetry. He 
could see by that that there wasn't anything 
mean about me ; so we got along right from 
the start. 

" I have met Doctor Holmes many times 
since ; and lately he said — however, I am 
wandering away from the one thing which I 
got on my feet to do, that is, to make my 
compliments to you, my fellow-teachers of the 
great public, and likewise to say I am right 
glad to see that Doctor Holmes is still in 
his prime and full of generous life ; and as 
age is not determined by years, but by trouble 
and by infirmities of mind and body, I hope it 
may be a very long time yet before any one 
can truthfully say, ' He is growing old.' " 

Mr. Howelis then introduced Mr. J. W. 
Harper of New York, who gave in his re- 
marks a delightful pen portrait of Doctor 
Holmes, the lyceum lecturer, which we have 
elsewhere quoted. Mr. E. C. Stedman followed 
Mr. Harper with a brief speech and graceful 
poem. Mr. T. B Aldrich spoke of the " inex- 
haustible kindness of Doctor Holmes to his 
younger brothers in literature," and Mr. Wil- 
liam Winter paid his tribute to the honored 



166 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

guest by " The Chieftain," a poem which he 
named for the occasion Hearts and Holmes. 

Mr. J. T. Trowbridge then read a poem entitled 
" Filling an Order," in which Nature compounds 
for Miss Columbia "three geniuses A i.," to 
grace her favorite city. She concludes her mix- 
ture as follows : 

Says she, " The fault I'm well aware, with genius is the 

presence 
Of altogether too much clay with quite too little essence, 
And sluggish atoms that obstruct the spiritual solution ; 
So now instead of spoiling these by over-much dilution 
With their fine elements I'll make a single rare phenom- 
enon, 
And of three common geniuses concoct a most uncommon 

one, 
So that the world shall smile to see a soul so universal, 
Such poesy and pleasantry, packed in so small a parcel. 

So said, so done ; the three in one she wrapped, and stuck 

the label 
Poet, Profess or ; Autocrat of WWs own Breakfast-Table." 

C. P. Cranch then read a fine sonnet, and Col- 
onel T. W. Higginson followed with felicitous 
remarks, a portion of which referring to the 
father of Doctor Holmes we have quoted else- 
where in the book. 



THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 167 

Letters of regrets were then read from R. 
B. Hayes, John Holmes, the poet's brother, 
George William Curtis and George Bancroft. 

Among others unable to be present, but who 
sent regrets, were Rebecca Harding Davis, 
Carl Schurz, Edwin P. Whipple, Noah Porter, 
George Ripley, Henry Watterson, George H. 
Boker, Frances Hodgson Burnett, L. Maria 
Child, Gail Hamilton, Parke Godwin, Donald 
G. Mitchell, John J. Piatt, Richard Grant 
White, D. C. Gilman, J. W. DeForest, Frederick 
Douglass, J. G. Holland, George W. Childs, John 
Hay and W. W. Story. 

Mr. James T. Fields was obliged to fulfil a lec- 
ture engagement soon after the speaking began, 
else he would have read the following fairy 
tale : — 

Once upon a time a company of good-natured 
fairies assembled for a summer moonlight dance 
on a green lawn in front of a certain pictur- 
esque old house in Cambridge. They had 
come out for a midnight lark, and as their 
twinkling feet flew about among the musical 
dewdrops they were suddenly interrupted by the 
well-known figure of the village doctor, which, 



108 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

emerging from the old mansion, rapidly made 
its way homeward. 

"Another new mortal has alighted on our happy 
planet," whispered a fairy gossip to her near 
companion. 

" Evidently so," replied the tiny creature, smil- 
ing good-naturedly on the doctor's footprints in 
the grass. 

" That is the minister's house," said another 
small personage, with a wink of satisfaction. 

" Perhaps it is a boy," ejaculated Fairy Num- 
ber One. 

"I know it is a boy!" said Fairy Number 
Two. I read it in the Doctor's face when the 
moon lighted up his countenance as he shut 
the door so softly behind him. 

" It is a boy ! " responded the Fairy Queen, 
who always knew everything, and that settled 
the question. 

" If that is the case," cried all the fairies at 
once, "let us try what magic still remains to us 
in this busy, bustling New England. Let us 
make that child's life a happy and a famous 
one if we can." 

"Agreed," replied the queen; "and I will 
lead off with a substantial gift to the little 



THE HOLMES BREAKFAST. 169 

new-comer. I will crown him with Cheerfulness, 
a sunny temperament, brimming over with mirth 
and happiness." 

" And I will second your Majesty's gift to the 
little man," said a sweet-voiced creature, "and 
tender him the ever-abiding gift of Song. He 
shall be a perpetual minstrel to gladden the 
hearts of all his fellow-mortals." 

" And I," said another, " will shower upon him 
the subtle power of Pathos and Romance, and 
he shall take unto himself the spell of a sor- 
cerer whenever he chooses to scatter abroad 
his wise and beautiful fancies." 

"And I," said a very astute-looking fairy, 
" will touch his lips with Persuasion ; he shall 
he a teacher of knowledge, and the divine gift 
of eloquence shall be at his command, to up- 
lift and instruct the people." 

"And I," said a quaint, energetic little body, 
" will endow him with a passionate desire to 
help forward the less favored sons and daugh- 
ters of earth, who are struggling for recognition 
and success in their various avocations." 

" And I," said a motherly-looking, amiable 
fairy, "will see that in due time he finds the best 
among women for his companionship, a helpmeet 



170 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

indeed, whose life shall be happily bound up in 
his life." 

"Do give me a chance," cried a beautiful 
young fairy " and I will answer for his chil- 
dren, that they may be worthy of their father, 
and all a mother's heart may pray that Heaven 
will vouchsafe to her." 

And after seventy years have rolled away 
into space, the same fairies assembled on the 
same lawn at the same season of the year, to 
compare notes with reference to their now fa- 
mous protege. And they declared that their magic 
had been thoroughly successful, and that their 
charms had all worked without a single flaw. 

Then they took hands, and dancing slowly 
around the time-honored mansion, sang this 
roundelay, framed in the words of their own 
beloved poet : — 

Strength to his hours of manly toil I 

Peace to his star-lit dreams I 
He loves alike the furrowed soil, 

The music-haunted streams ! 

Sweet smiles to keep forever bright 

The sunshine on his lips, 
And faith that sees the ring of light 

Round Nature's last eclipse I 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 171 



CHAPTER XV. 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 



IN Pages from an old Volume of Life, 
one of the latest books published by Doctor 
Holmes, we have a collection of most delight- 
ful orations and essays. Some of them we 
recognize as old, familiar friends. " Bread and 
the Newspaper," for instance, recalls vividly 
those sad, terribly earnest days when the civil 
war was rending not only our land but our 
hearts. Something to eat, and the daily papers 
to read — these we must have, no matter what 
else we had to give up ! 

War taught us, as nothing else could, what 
we really were. It exalted our manhood and 
our womanhood, and showed us our substantial 
human qualities for a long time kept out of 
sight, it may be, by the spirit of commerce, 
the love of art, science, or literature. Those 
who had called Doctor Holmes " an aristocrat," 



172 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

" a Tory," forgot all their bitter feelings when 
he said, "We are finding out that not only 
' patriotism is eloquence,' but that heroism is 
gentility. All ranks are wonderfully equalized 
under the fire of a masked battery. The plain 
artisan, or the rough fireman, who faces the 
lead and iron like a man, is the truest repre- 
sentative we can show of the heroes of Crecy 
and Agincourt. And if one of our fine gentle- 
men puts off his straw-colored kids and stands 
by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads 
him on to the attack, he is as honorable in 
our eyes and in theirs as if he were ill-dressed 
and his hands were soiled with labor. 

In The Inevitable Tiial> an oration deliv- 
ered on the 4th of July, 1863, before the 
City Authorities of Boston, Doctor Holmes 
who had been falsely classed among the ene- 
mies of the Anti-slavery movement, spoke as 
follows : — 

" Long before the accents of our famous 
statesmen resounded in the halls of the Capi- 
tol, long before the Liberator opened its bat- 
teries, the controversy now working itself out 
by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted. 
Washington warned his countrymen of the dan- 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 173 

ger of sectional divisions, well knowing the line 
of clearage that ran through the seemingly 
solid fabric. Jefferson foreshadowed the judg- 
ment to fall upon the land for its sins against 
a just God. Andrew Jackson announced a 
quarter of a century beforehand that the next 
pretext of revolution would be slavery. De 
Tocqueville recognized with that penetrating in- 
sight which analyzed our institutions and con- 
ditions so keenly, that the Union was to be 
endangered by slavery not through its interests, 
but through the change of character it was 
bringing about in the people of the two sec- 
tions, the same fatal change which George 
Mason, more than half a century before, had 
declared to be the most pernicious effect of the 
system, adding the solemn warning, now fear- 
fully justifying itself in the sight of his de- 
scendants, that ' by an inevitable chain of causes 
and effects, Providence punishes national sins by 
national calamities.' 

" The Virginian romancer pictured the far-off 
scenes of the conflict which he saw approaching 
as the prophets of Israel painted the coming 
woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of 
Boston announced the very year when the cur- 



174 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

tain should rise on the yet unopened drama. 

" The wise men of the past, and the shrewd 
men of our own time, who warned us of the 
calamities in store for our nation, never doubted 
what was the cause which was to produce first 
alienation and finally rupture. The descendants 
of the men, ' daily exercised in tyranny,' the 
' petty tyrants,' as their own leading states- 
men called them long ago, came at length to 
love the institution which their fathers had 
condemned while they tolerated. It is the fear- 
ful realization of that vision of the poet where 
the lost angels snuff up with eager nostrils 
the sulphurous emanations of the bottomless 
abyss, — so have their natures become changed 
by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm 
of darkness." 

In this same grand oration occur also these 
eloquent words: — 

" Whether we know it or not, whether we 
mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against 
the system that has proved the source of all 
those miseries which the author of the Declar- 
ation of Independence trembled to anticipate. 
And this ought to make us willing to do and 
to suffer cheerfully. There were Holy Wars of 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 175 

old, in which it was glory enough to die; wars 
in which the one aim was to rescue the sep- 
ulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. 
The sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine! 
He rose from that burial-place more than eight- 
een hundred years ago. He is crucified wher- 
ever his brothers are slain without cause ; he 
lies buried wherever man, made in his Maker's 
image, is entombed in ignorance lest he should 
learn the rights which his Divine Master gave 
him ! This is our Holy War, and we must 
bring to it all the power with which he fought 
against the Almighty before he was cast from 
heaven." 

In his Hunt after the Captain, we realize 
how near the "dull dead ghastliness of War" 
came to the fond father's heart as he sought 
his wounded hero through those dreary hospi- 
tal wards ! He knew of what he spake when ap- 
pealing so eloquently to his fellow-patriots : — 

" Sons and daughters of New England, men 
and women of the North, brothers and sisters 
in the bond of the American Union, you have 
among you the scarred and wasted soldiers 
who have shed their blood for your temporal 
salvation. They bore your nation's emblems 



176 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

bravely through the fire and smoke of the bat- 
tle-field ; nay, their own bodies are starred with 
bullet-wounds and striped with sabre-cuts, as 
if to mark them as belonging to their country 
until their dust becomes a portion of the soil 
which they defended. In every Northern grave- 
yard slumber the victims of this destroying 
struggle. Many whom you remember playing 
as children amidst the clover blossoms of our 
Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds 
with strange Southern wild flowers blooming 
over them. By those wounds of living heroes, 
by those graves of fallen martyrs, by the hopes 
of your children, and the claims of your chil- 
dren's children yet unborn, in the name of 
outraged honor, in the interest of violated sov- 
ereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, 
for the sake of men everywhere, and of our 
common humanity, for the glory of God and 
the advancement of his kingdom on earth, your 
country calls upon you to stand by her through 
good report and through evil report, in triumph 
and in defeat, until she emerges from the great 
war of Western civilization, Queen of the broad 
continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's 
emancipated peoples." 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 177 

It will be remembered that this heart-stirring 
oration, The Inevitable Trial, from which the 
above is quoted, was delivered at one of the 
most discouraging periods of the war ; when 
Lee was in Pennsylvania, and just before the 
capture of Vicksburg. 

Among the other essays and orations in 
Pages from an old Volume of Life, we find 
the Physiology of Walking, which contains 
many interesting facts concerning the human 
wheel, with its spokes and felloes. 

" Walking," says Doctor Holmes, "is a per- 
petual falling with a perpetual self-recovery. 
It is a most complex, violent, and perilous 
operation, which we divest of its extreme dan- 
ger only by continual practice from a very 
early period of life. We find how complex 
it is when we attempt to analyze it, and we 
see that we never understood it thoroughly 
until the time of the instantaneous photograph. 
We learn how violent it is, when we walk 
against a post or a door in the dark. We dis- 
cover how dangerous it is when we slip or 
trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dis- 
locating our limbs, or overlook the last step 
of a flight of stairs, and discover with what 



178 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

headlong violence we have been hurling our- 
selves forward. 

" Two curious facts are easily proved. First, 
a man is shorter when he is walking than 
when at rest. We have found a very simple 
way of showing this by having a rod or stick 
placed horizontally, so as to touch the top of 
the head forcibly, as we stand under it. In 
walking rapidly beneath it, even if the eyes 
are shut, the top of the head will not even 
graze the rod. The other fact is, that one 
side of a man always tends to outwalk the 
other side, so that no person can walk far in 
a straight line, if he is blindfolded. The Sea- 
sons, and The Human Body and its Management, 
were originally published in the Atlantic Al- 
manac. Cinders from the Ashes gives some 
exceedingly interesting reminiscences. 

Richard Henry Dana, the schoolboy, is 
described by Doctor Holmes as ruddy, sturdy, 
quiet and reserved ; and of Margaret Fuller he 
says, " Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicu- 
ous among the schoolgirls of unlettered ori- 
gin, by that look which rarely fails to betray 
hereditary and congenital culture, was a young 
person very nearly of my own age. She came 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 179 

with the reputation of being ' smart/ as we should 
have called it ; clever, as we say nowadays. 
Her air to her schoolmates was marked by 
a certain stateliness and distance ; as if she 
had other thoughts than theirs, and was not 
of them. She was a great student and a great 
reader of what she used to call 'naw-vels;' I 
remember her so well as she appeared at school 
and later, that I regret that she had not been 
faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day 
of her best looks. None know her aspect 
who have not seen her living. Margaret, as I 
remember her at school and afterwards, was 
tall, fair complexioned, with a watery, aqua- 
marine lustre in her light eyes, which she used 
to make small, as one does who looks at the 
sunshine. 

"A remarkable point about her was that long, 
flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange, 
sinuous movements, which one who loved her 
would compare to those of a swan, and one 
who loved her not, to those of the ophidian 
who tempted our common mother. Her talk 
was affluent, magisterial, de Jiaut en das, some 
would say euphuistic, but surpassing the talk 
of women in breadth and audacitv. Her face 



180 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

kindled and reddened and dilated in every feat- 
ure as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in 
a fine storm of indignation at the supposed 
ill treatment of a relative, showed itself capable 
of something resembling what Milton calls the 
Viraginian aspect." 

A composition of Margaret's was one day 
taken up by the boy Oliver. 

" It is a trite remark," she began. 

Alas ! the embryo-poet did not know the 
meaning of the word trite. 

"How could I ever judge Margaret fairly," 
he exclaims, " after such a crushing discovery 
of her superiority?" 

Of his instructors and schoolmates at Andover, 
Doctor Holmes has given us numerous pen 
portraits. The old Academy building had a 
dreary look to the homesick boy, but he soon 
recovered from his " slightly nostalgic" state, 
and found not a few congenial spirits in his 
new surroundings. 

One fine, rosy-faced boy with whom he had 
a school discussion upon Mary, Queen of Scots, 
and for whom he has always cherished a last- 
ing friendship, is now the well-known Phinehas 
Barnes. Another little fellow, with black hair 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 181 

and very black eyes, studying with head be- 
tween ' his hands, and eyes fastened to his 
book as if reading a will that made him heir 
to a million, was the future professor, Greek 
scholar and Bible Commentator, Horatio Balch 
Hackett. One of the masters was the late 
Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, "an excellent and 
lovable man," says Doctor Holmes, "who looked 
kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished 
a sincere regard." Professor Moses Stuart he 
describes as " tall, lean, with strong, bold feat- 
ures, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, thin, 
expressive lips, and great solemnity and impres- 
siveness of voice and manner. His air was 
Roman, his neck long and bare, like Cicero's, and 
his toga, — that is, his broadcloth cloak, — was 
carried on his arm, whatever might have been 
the weather, with such a statue-like, rigid grace 
that he might have been turned into marble 
as he stood, and looked noble by the side of 
the antiques of the Vatican." Then, there was 
Doctor Porter, an invalid, with the prophetic 
handkerchief bundling his throat ; and Doctor 
Woods, who looked his creed decidedly, and 
had the firm fibre of a theological athlete. But 
none of the preceptors, it may be presumed, 



182 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

was so closely watched as the one to whom 
a dream had come that he should drop dead 
when praying. " More than one boy kept his 
eye on him during his public devotions, pos- 
sessed by the same feeling the man had who 
followed Van Amburgh about, with the expec- 
tation, let us not say hope, of seeing the lion 
bite his head off sooner or later." 

In Mechanism in TJionght and Morals, we 
find a deal of psychology as well as science. 

" It is in the moral world," says Doctor Holmes, 
" that materialism has worked the strangest 
confusion. In various forms, under imposing 
names and aspects, it has thrust itself into 
the moral relations, until one hardly knows 
where to look for any first principles without 
upsetting everything in searching for them. 

"The moral universe includes nothing but 
the exercise of choice : all else is machinery. 
What we can help and what we cannot 
help are on two sides of a line which sepa- 
rates the sphere of human responsibility from 
that of the Being who has arranged and con- 
trols the order of things. 

"The question of the freedom of the will has 
been an open one, fron the days of Milton's 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 188 

demons in conclave to the noteworthy essay 
of Mr. Hazard, our Rhode Island neighbor. 
It still hangs suspended between the seem- 
ingly exhaustive strongest motive argument 
and certain residual convictions. The sense 
that we are, to a limited extent, self-determin- 
ing ; the sense of effort in willing ; the sense 
of responsibility in view of the future, and 
the verdict of conscience in review of the past, 
— all of these are open to the accusation of 
fallacy; but they all leave a certain undis- 
charged balance in most minds. We can invoke 
the strong arm of the Detis in machina, as 
Mr. Hazard, and Kant and others, before him 
have done. Our will may be a primary initi- 
ating cause or force, as unexplainable, as un- 
reducible, as indecomposable, as impossible if 
you choose, but as real to our belief as the 
cetemitas a parte ante. The divine foreknowl- 
edge is no more in the way of delegated choice 
than the divine omnipotence is in the way of 
delegated power. The Infinite can surely slip 
the cable of the finite if it choose so to do." 
With outspoken braveness Doctor Holmes 
rejects "the mechanical doctrine which makes 
me," he says, "the slave of outside influences, 



184 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

whether it work with the logic of Edwards, 
or the averages of Buckle ; whether it come 
in the shape of the Greek's destiny, or the 
Mahometan's fatalism." 

But he claims, too, the right to eliminate 
all mechanical ideas which have crowded into 
the sphere of intelligent choice between right 
and wrong. " The pound of flesh," he declares, 
" I will grant to Nemesis ; but in the name 
of human nature, not one drop of blood, — 
not one drop." 

And this leads us to speak of Doctor 
Holmes' religious views. He attended King's 
Chapel, and is classed among the most liberal- 
minded of the Unitarian creed. 

When chairman of the Boston Unitarian 
Festival, in 1877, he gave the following list 
of certain theological beliefs that he has always 
delighted to combat. 

" May I," he begins, " without committing 
any one but myself, enumerate a few of the 
stumbling blocks which still stand in the way 
of some who have many sympathies with what 
is called the liberal school of thinkers? 

"The notion of sin as a transferable object 
As philanthropy has ridded us of chattel 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 185 

slavery, so philosophy must rid us of chattel 
sin and all its logical consequences. 

" The notion that what we call sin is any- 
thing else than inevitable, unless the Deity 
had seen fit to give every human being a 
perfect nature, and develop it by a perfect 
education. 

" The oversight of the fact that all moral 
relations between man and his Maker are re- 
ciprocal, and must meet the approval of man's 
enlightened conscience before he can render 
true and heartfelt homage to the power that 
called him into being, and is not the great- 
est obligation to all eternity on the side of 
the greatest wisdom and the greatest power? 

" The notion that the Father of mankind is 
subject to the absolute control of a certain 
malignant entity known under the false name 
of justice, or subject to any law such as 
would have made the father of the prodigal 
son meet him with an account-book and pack 
him off to jail, instead of welcoming him back 
and treating him to the fatted calf. 

" The notion that useless suffering is in any 
sense a satisfaction for sin, and not simply an 
evil added to a previous one." 



186 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 

In reviewing the life and the writings of 
Jonathan Edwards, Doctor Holmes with his 
usual fairness and kindly spirit toward all man- 
kind, declares that the spiritual nature seems 
to be a natural endowment, like a musical ear. 

" Those who have no ear for music must be 
very careful how they speak about that mys- 
terious world of thrilling vibrations which are 
idle noises to them. And so the true saint 
can be appreciated only by saintly natures. 
Yet the least spiritual man can hardly read 
the remarkable ' Resolutions ' of Edwards with- 
out a reverence akin to awe for his purity and 
elevation. His beliefs and his conduct we need 
not hesitate to handle freely. The spiritual 
nature is no safeguard against error of doc- 
trine or practice ; indeed it may be doubted 
whether a majority of all the spiritual natures in 
the world would be found in Christian coun- 
tries. Edwards' system seems, in the light of 
to-day, to the last degree barbaric, mechanical, 
materialistic, pessimistic. If he had lived a 
hundred years later, and breathed the air of 
freedom, he could not have written with such 
old-world barbarism as we find in his volcanic 
sermons. ....... 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 187 

" There is no sufficient reason for attacking 
the motives of a man so saintly in life, so 
holy in aspirations, so patient, so meek, so la- 
borious, so thoroughly in earnest in the work 
to which his life was given. But after long 
smothering in the sulphurous atmosphere of 
his thought, one cannot help asking, is this, 

— or anything like this, — the accepted belief of 
any considerable part of Protestantism ? If so, 
we must say with Bacon, ' It were better to 
have no opinion of God than such an opinion 
as is unworthy of him.' " 

In speaking of the old reproach against physi- 
cians, that where there were three of them to- 
gether there were two atheists, Doctor Holmes 
pertinently remarks : " There is, undoubtedly, a 
strong tendency in the pursuits of the medical 
profession to produce disbelief in that figment of 
tradition and diseased human imagination which 
has been installed in the seat of divinity by 
the priesthood of cruel and ignorant ages. It is 
impossible, or, at least, very difficult, for a physi- 
cian who has seen the perpetual efforts of Nature 

— whose diary is the book he reads oftenest — to 
heal wounds, to expel poisons, to do the best that 
can be done under the given conditions, — it is 



188 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

very difficult for him to believe in a world where 
wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot give 
a respite from pain, where sleep never comes 
with its sweet oblivion of suffering, where 
the art of torture is the only faculty which re- 
mains to the children of that same Father who 
cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has 
often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician 
has, no doubt, frequently repudiated him as a 
monstrosity. 

" On the other hand, the physician has often 
been renounced for piety as well as for his pecu- 
liarly professional virtue of charity, led upward by 
what he sees the source of all the daily mar- 
vels wrought before his own eyes. So it was 
that Galen gave utterance to that song of praise 
which the sweet singer of Israel need not have 
been ashamed of ; and if this heathen could be 
lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need not 
be surprised to find so many devout Christian 
worshippers among the crowd of medical 'athe- 
ists.' " 

In coming back again as a regular contribu- 
tor to the magazine which Doctor Holmes was 
so prominently identified with a quarter of a 
century ago, he indulges in a few entertaining 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 189 

reflections. "When I sat down to write the 
first paper I sent to the Atlantic Monthly" 
he says, " I felt somewhat as a maiden of 
more than mature effloresence may be supposed 
to feel as she passes down the broad aisle in 
her bridal veil and wealth of orange blossoms. 
I had written little of late years. I was at 
that time older than Goldsmith was when he 
died, and Goldsmith, as Doctor Johnson says, 
was a plant that flowered late. A new gener- 
ation had grown up since I had written the 
verses by which, if remembered at all, I was 
best known. I honestly feared that I might 
prove the superfluous veteran who has no busi- 
ness behind the footlights. I can as honestly 
say that it turned out otherwise. I was most 
kindly welcomed, and now I am looking back 
on that far-off time as the period — I will not 
say of youth — for I was close upon the five- 
barred gate of the cinquantaine, though I had 
not yet taken the leap — but of marrowy and 
vigorous manhood. Those were the days of 
unaided vision, of acute hearing, of alert move- 
ments, of feelings almost boyish in their vivacity. 
It is a long cry from the end of a second 
quarter of a century in a man's life to the 



190 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

end of the third quarter. His companions have 
fallen all around him, and he finds himself in 
a newly peopled world. His mental furnishing 
looks old-fashioned and faded to the generation 
which is crowding about him with its new 
patterns and fresh colors. Shall he throw open 
his apartments to visitors, or is it not wiser 
to live on his memories in a decorous privacy, 
and not risk himself before the keen young 
eyes and relentless judgment of the new-comers, 
who have grown up in strength and self-reli- 
ance while he has been losing force and con- 
fidence. If that feeling came over me a quarter 
of a century ago, it is not strange that it 
comes back upon me now. Having laid down 
the burden, which for more than thirty-five 
years I have carried cheerfully, I might natur- 
ally seek the quiet of my chimney corner, and 
purr away the twilight of my life, unheard 
beyond the circle of my own fireplace. But 
when I see what my living contemporaries are 
doing, I am shamed out of absolute inertness 
and silence. The men of my birth year are 
so painfully industrious at this very time that 
one of the same date hardly dares to be idle. 
I look across the Atlantic and see Mr. Glad 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 191 

stone, only four months younger than myself, 
and standing erect with patriots' grievances on 
one shoulder, and Pharaoh's pyramids on the 
other — an Atlas whose intervals of repose are 
paroxysms of learned labor; I listen to Tenny- 
son, another birth of the same year, filling the 
air with melody long after the singing months 
of life are over ; I come nearer home, and 
here is my very dear friend and college class- 
mate, so certain to be in every good move- 
ment with voice or pen, or both, that, where 
two or three are gathered together for useful 
ends, if James Freeman Clarke is not with 
them, it is because he is busy with a book or 
a discourse meant for a larger audience; I 
glance at the placards on the blank walls that 
I am passing, and there I see the colossal 
head of Barnum, the untiring, inexhaustible, 
insuperable, ever-triumphant and jubilant Bar- 
num, who came to his atmospheric life less 
than a year before I began to breathe the 
fatal mixture, and still wages his Titanic 
battle with his own past superlatives. How 
can one dare to sit down inactive with such 
examples before him? One must do something, 



192 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

were it nothing more profitable than the work 
of that dear old Penelope, of almost ninety 
years, whom I so well remember hemming 
over and over again the same piece of linen, 
her attendant scissors removing each day's work 
at evening ; herself meantime being kindly 
nursed in the illusion that she was still the 
useful martyr of the household." 

An author, in Doctor Holmes' opinion, should 
know that the very characteristics which make 
him the object of admiration to many, and 
endear him to some among them, will render 
him an object of dislike to a certain number 
of individuals of equal, it may be of superior, 
intelligence. The converse of all this is very 
true. 

"There will be individuals — they may be few, 
they may be many — who will so instantly 
recognize, so eagerly accept, so warmly adopt, 
even so devoutly idolize, the writer in question, 
that self-love itself, dulled as its palate is by 
the hot spices of praise, draws back overcome 
by the burning stimulants of adoration. I was 
told, not long since, by one of our most justly 
admired authoresses, that a correspondent wrote 



OBATIONS AND ESSAYS. 193 

to her that she had read one of her stories 
fourteen times in succession." 

There is a deep meaning in these elective 
affinities. Each personality is more or less 
completely the complement of some other. 
Doctor Holmes thinks it should never be for- 
gotten by the critic that " every grade of 
mental development demands a literature of its 
own ; a little above its level, that it may be 
lifted to a higher grade, but not too much 
above it, so that it requires too long a stride — 
a stairway, not a steep wall to climb. The 
true critic is not the sharp captator verborum ; 
not the brisk epigrammatist, showing off his 
own cleverness, always trying to outflank the 
author against whom he has arrayed his wits 
and his learning. He is a man who knows 
the real wants of the reading world, and can 
prize at their just value the writings which 
meet those wants." 

There is also another side of the picture. 
Doctor Holmes does not forget the trials of 
authorship. The writer who attains a certain 
measure of popularity " will be startled to find 
himself the object of an embarrassing devotion, 
and almost" appropriation, by some of his parish 



194 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

of readers. He will blush at his lonely desk, 
as he reads the extravagances of expression 
which pour over him like the oil which ran 
down upon the beard of Aaron, and even down 
to the skirts of his garments — an extreme 
unction which seems hardly desirable. We 
ought to have his photograph as he reads one 
of those frequent missives, oftenest traced, we 
may guess, in the delicate, slanting hand which 
betrays the slender fingers of the sympathetic 
sisterhood. 

"A slight sense of the ridiculous at being 
made so much of qualifies the placid toler- 
ance with which the rhymester or the essay- 
ist sees himself preferred to the great masters 
in prose and verse, and reads his name glow- 
ing in a halo of epithets which might belong 
to Bacon or Milton. Wc need not grudge 
him such pleasure as he may derive from the 
illusion of a momentary revery, in which he 
dreams of himself as clad in royal robes and 
exalted among the immortals. The next post 
will probably bring him some slip from a 
newspaper or critical journal, which will strip 
him of his regalia, as Thackeray, in one of 
his illustrations, has disrobed and denuded the 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 195 

grand monarque. He saw himself but a 
moment ago a colossal figure in a drapery of 
rhetorical purple, ample enough for an Em- 
peror, as Bernini would clothe him. The 
image breaker has passed by, belittling him 
by comparison, jostling him off his pedestal, 
levelling his most prominent feature, or even 
breaking a whole ink bottle against him as 
the indignant moralist did on the figure in the 
vestibule of the opera house — the shortest 
and most effective satire that ever came from 
that fountain of approval and commendation. 
Such are some of the varied experiences of 
authorship." 

Out of his literary career as a successful 
writer, Doctor Holmes was able to formu- 
late many rules for the self-protection of 
authors, which were adopted unanimously at 
an authors' association which was held in 
Washington last September, and the remainder 
of his "talk" is devoted to extracts from their 
proceedings. Appended are a few of them : 

Of visits of strangers to authors. These 
are not always distinguishable from each 
other, and may justly be considered together. 
The stranger should send up his card if he 



196 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

has one ; if he has none, he should, if ad- 
mitted, at once announce himself and his 
object, without circumlocution, as thus; " My 
name is M. or N., from X. or Y. I wish to 
see and take the hand of a writer whom I 
have long admired for his," etc., etc. Here 
the author should extend his hand, and reply in 
substance as follows : "I am pleased to see 
you, my dear sir, and very glad that any- 
thing I have written has been a source of 
pleasure or profit to you." The visitor has 
now had what he says he came for, and, after 
making a brief polite acknowledgment, should 
retire, unless, for special reasons, he is urged 
to stay longer. 

Of autograph-seekers. The increase in the 
number of applicants for autographs is so great 
that it has become necessary to adopt positive 
regulations to protect the author from the ex- 
orbitant claims of this class of virtuosos. The 
following propositions were adopted without dis- 
cussion : 

No author is under any obligation to answer 
any letter from an unknown person applying 
for his autograph. If he sees fit to do so, it 
is a gratutious concession on his part. 



OBATIONS AND ESSAYS. 197 

No stranger should ask for more than one 
autograph. 

No stranger should request an author to 
copy a poem, or even a verse. He should 
remember that he is one of many thousands ; 
that one thousand fleas are worse than one 
hornet, and that a mob of mosquitoes will 
draw more blood than a single horse leech. 

Every correspondent applying for an auto- 
graph should send a card or blank paper, in 
a stamped envelope, directed to himself (or 
herself). If he will not take the trouble to 
attend to all this, which he can just as well 
as to make the author do it, he must not 
expect the author to make good his defi- 
ciencies. [Accepted by acclamation]. 

Sending a stamp does not constitute a claim 
on an author for answer. [Received with loud 
applause]. The stamp may be retained by the 
author, or, what is better, devoted to the use 
of some appropriate charity, as for instance, 
the asylum for idiots and feeble-minded per- 
sons. 

Albums. An album of decent external as- 
pect may, without impropriety, be offered 
to an author, with the request that he will 



198 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

write his name therein. It is not proper, as 
a general rule, to ask for anything more 
than the name. The author may, of course, 
add a quotation from his writings, or a senti- 
ment, if so disposed ; but this must be con- 
sidered as a work of supererogation, and an 
exceptional manifestation of courtesy. 

Bed-quilt autographs. It should be a source 
of gratification to an author to contribute to 
the soundness of his reader's slumbers, if he 
cannot keep him awake by his writings. He 
should therefore cheerfully inscribe his name 
on the scrap of satin or other stuff (provided 
always that it be sent him in a stamped and 
directed envelope), that it may take its place 
in the patchwork mosaic for which it is in- 
tended. 

Letters of admiration. These may be ac- 
cepted as genuine, unless they contain speci- 
mens of the writer's own composition, upon 
which a critical opinion is requested, in which 
case they are to be regarded in the same 
light as medicated sweetmeats, namely, as 
meaning more than their looks imply. Gen- 
uine letters of admiration, being usually con- 
sidered by the recipient as proofs of good 



OBATIOXS AND ESSAYS. 199 

taste and sound judgment on the part of his 
unknown correspondent, may be safely left to 
his decision as to whether they shall be an- 
swered or not. 

The author of Elsie Venue}' thus excuses 
himself for opening the budget of the griev- 
ances of authors. "In obtaining and giving to 
the public this abstract of the proceedings of 
the association, I have been impelled by the 
same feelings of humanity which led me to 
join the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty 
to Animals, believing that the sufferings of 
authors are as much entitled to sympathy and 
relief as those of the brute creation." 

The birthday of the Emperor of Japan is the 
principal holiday of the year among his subjects, 
and as Saturday, November 3d, 1883, was 
the thirty- third anniversary of the birthday of 
Mutsuhito Tenno, the reigning Emperor, it was 
appropriately celebrated by the Japanese gen- 
tlemen in Boston. The Japanese department 
at the Foreign Exhibition was closed, and in 
the evening a banquet was given at the Par- 
ker House, about sixty gentlemen assembling 
in response to the invitation of Mr. S. R. 
Takahashi, chief of the imperial Japanese com- 



200 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

mission to the Boston Foreign Exhibition. 
The entrance to the banquet rooms was deco- 
rated with the Japanese and American colors, 
and at the head of the hall were portraits of 
the Emperor and Empress of Japan, with the 
colors of that country between them. The 
occasion was a very enjoyable one, and was 
especially interesting as it was a departure from 
the custom at ordinary dinners here, several 
gentlemen dividing with the presiding officer 
the duty of proposing the toasts. One of the 
most delightful orations of the evening given 
by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was as follows : 

" I have heard of ' English as she is spoke," 
being taught in ten lessons, but I never heard 
that a nation's literature could have justice 
done to it in ten minutes. An ancestress of 
mine — one of my thirty-two great-great-great- 
great-grandmothers — a noted poetess in her 
day, thus addressed her little brood of children : 

Alas ! my birds, you wisdom want 
Of perils you are ignorant ; 
Ofttimes in grass, on trees, in flight, 
Sore accidents on you may light; 

Oh, to your safety have an eye, 
So happy may you live and die. 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 201 

" In accepting your kind invitation, I confess 
that I was ignorant of my perils. I did not 
follow the counsel of my grandmamma with 
the four g's in having an eye to my own 
safety. For I fear that if I had dreamed of 
being called on to answer for American litera- 
ture, one of those 'previous engagements,' 
which crop out so opportunely, would have 
stood between me and my present trying posi- 
tion. I had meant, if called upon, to say a 
few words about a Japanese youth who studied 
law in Boston, a very cultivated and singu- 
larly charming young person, who died not 
very long after his return to his native country. 
Some of you may remember young Enouie — 
I am not sure that I spell it rightly, and I 
know that I cannot pronounce it properly ; for 
from his own lips it was as soft as an angel's 
whisper. His intelligence, his delicate breeding, 
the loveliness of his character, captivated al. 
who knew him. We loved him, and we mourned 
for him as if he had been a child of our own 
soil. But of him I must say no more. 

" In speaking of American literature we nat- 
urally think first of our historical efforts. We 
see that books hold but a small part of Amer- 



202 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

ican history. The axe and the ploughshare are 
the two pens with which our New World 
annals have been principally written, with 
schoolhouses as notes of interrogation, and 
steeples as exclamation points of pious adora- 
tion and gratitude. Within half a century the 
railroad has ruled our braad page all over, and 
rewritten the story, with States for new chap- 
ters and cities for paragraphs. This is the 
kind of history which he who runs may read, 
and he must run fast and far if he means to 
read any considerable part of it. 

" But we must not forget our political his- 
tory, perishable in great measure as to its form, 
long enduring in its results. This literature is 
the index of our progress — in both directions 
— forward and the contrary. From the days 
of Washington and Franklin to the times 
still fresh in our memory, from the Declara- 
tion of Independence to the proclamation which 
enfranchised the colored race, our political lit- 
erature, with all its terrible blunders and 
short-comings, has been, after all, the fairest 
expression the world has yet seen of what a 
free people and a free press have to say and 
to show for themselves. 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 203 

" But besides ' Congressional Documents ' and 
the like, the terror of librarians and the de- 
light of paper-makers, we do a good deal of 
other printing. We make some books, a good 
many books, a great many books, so many 
that the hyperbole at the end of St. John's 
gospel would hardly be an extravagance in 
speaking of them. And among these are a 
number of histories which hold an honorable 
place on the shelves of all the great libraries 
of Christendom. Why should I enumerate 
them ? For history is a Boston specialty. 
From the days of Prescott and Ticknor to 
those of Motley and Parkman, we have al- 
ways had an historian or two on hand, as 
they used always to have a lion or two in 
the Tower of London. 

"Next to the historians naturally come the 
story-tellers and romancers. The essential dif- 
ference is — I would not apply the rough 
side of the remark to historians like the best 
of our own, but it is very often the fact — 
that history tells lies about real persons and 
fiction tells truth through the mouths of un- 
real ones. England threw open the side doors 
of its library to Irving. The continent flung 



204 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

wide its folding doors to Cooper. Laplace 
was once asked who was the greatest mathe- 
matician of Germany. 'Pfaff is the greatest,' 
he answered. ' I thought Gauss was,' the 
questioner said. 'You asked me,' rejoined 
Laplace, 'who was the greatest mathematician 
of Germany. Gauss was the greatest mathe- 
matician of Europe.' So, I suppose we might 
say The Pilot is or was the most popular 
book ever written in America, but Uncle Toms 
Cabin is the most popular story ever pub- 
lished in the world. And if The Heart of 
Mid Lothian added a new glory of romance 
to the traditions of Auld Reekie, The Scarlet 
Letter did as much for the memories of our 
own New England. I need not speak of the 
living writers, some of whom are among us, 
who have changed the old scornful question 
into ' Who does not read an American 
book ? ' 

" As to poetical literature, I must confess 
that, except a line or two of Philip Freneau's, I 
know little worthy of special remembrance be- 
fore the beginning of this century, always 
excepting, as in duty bound, the verses oC 
my manifold grandmother. The conditions of 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 205 

the country were unfavorable to the poetical 
habit of mind. The voice that broke the 
silence was that of Bryant, a clear and smooth 
baritone, if I may borrow a musical term, 
with a gamut of a few notes of a grave and 
manly quality. Then came Longfellow, the 
poet of the fireside, of the library, of all gentle 
souls and cultivated tastes, whose Muse breathed 
a soft contralto that was melody itself, and 
Emerson, with notes that reached an octave 
higher than any American poet — a singer 
whose 

Voice fell like a falling star. 

Like that of the bird addressed by Words- 
worth — 

At once far off and near, 

it was a 

Cry 

Which made [us] look a thousand ways, 
In bush and tree and sky; 

for whether it soared from the earth or dropped 
from heaven, it was next to impossible to 
divine. 

" I will not speak of the living poets of the 
old or the new generation. It belongs to the 



206 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

young to give the heartiest welcome to the 
new brood of singers. Samuel Rogers said 
that when he heard a new book praised, he 
read an old one. Mr. Emerson, in one of his 
later essays, advises us never to read a book 
that is not a year old. This I will say, that 
every month shows us in the magazines, and 
even in the newspapers, verse that would 
have made a reputation in the early days of 
the North Americcui Review, but which attracts 
little more notice than a breaking bubble. 

"A great improvement is noticeable in the 
character of criticism, which is leaving the 
hands of the 'general utility' writers and 
passing into the hands of experts. The true 
critic is the last product of literary civiliza- 
tion. It costs as great an effort to human- 
ize the being known by that name as it does 
to make a good church-member of a scalping 
savage. Criticism is a noble function, but 
only so in noble hands. We have just wel- 
comed Mr. Arnold as its worthy English rep- 
resentative ; we could not secure our creditors 
more handsomely than we have done by leav- 
ing Mr. Lowell in pledge for our visitor's safe 
return. 



ORATIONS AND ESSAYS. 207 

" One more hopeful mark of literary progress 
is seen in our cyclopaedias, our periodicals, 
our newspapers, and I may add our indexes. 
I would commend to the attention of our 
enlightened friends such works as Mr. Pool's 
great Index to Periodical Literature, Mr. Ali- 
bone's Dictionary of Authors, and the Index 
Medicus, now publishing at Washington — a 
wonderful achievement of organized industry, 
still carried on under the superintendence of 
Doctor Billings, and well deserving examin- 
ation by all scholars, whatever their calling. 

"We have learned so much from our Japa- 
nese friends, that we should be thankful to pay 
them back something in return. With art such 
as they have, they must also have a literature 
showing the same originality, grace, facility and 
simple effectiveness. Let us hope they will 
carry away something of our intellectual pro- 
ducts, as well as those good wishes which 
follow them wherever they show their beauti- 
ful works of art and their pleasant and always 
welcome faces." 



208 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 



DOCTOR HOLMES has two sons and one 
daughter. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, 
his eldest child, was born in 1841. When a young 
lad, he attended the school of Mr. E. S. Dixwell, 
in Boston, and it was here that he met his 
future wife, Miss Fannie Dixwell. In his grad- 
uating year at Harvard College (1861), he 
joined the Fourth Battalion of Infantry, 
commanded by Major Thomas G. Steven- 
son. The company was at that time stationed 
at Fort Independence, Boston Harbor, and it 
was there that young Holmes wrote his poem 
for Class Day. He served three years in the 
war, and was wounded first in the breast at 
Ball's Bluff, and then in the neck at the Battle 
of Antietam. 

In Doctor Holmes' Hunt after the Captain, 
we have not only a vivid picture of war times, 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 209 

but a most touching revelation of fatherly love 
and solicitude. The young captain was wounded 
yet again at Sharpsburgh, and was after- 
wards brevetted as Lieutenant-Colonel. During 
General Grant's campaign of 1864 he served as 
aide-de-camp to Brigadier-General H. G. Wright. 
After the war he entered the Harvard Law 
School, and in 1866 received the degree of 
LL. B. Since then he has practised law in 
Boston, and has written many valuable articles 
upon legal subjects. 

His edition of Kent's Commentaries on Amer- 
ican Law, to which he devoted three years of 
careful labor, has received the highest encomi- 
ums, and his volume on The Common Law forms 
an indispensable part of every law student's 
library. 

In 1882, he was appointed Professor in the 
Harvard Law School, and a few weeks later 
was elected Justice in the Supreme Court of 
Massachusetts. 

At the Lawyers' Banquet, given January 30th, 
1883, at the Hotel Vendome, Honorable Wil- 
liam G. Russell thus introduced the father of 
the newly-appointed judge : 

" We come now to a many-sided subject, ap*' 



210 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

I know not on which side to attack him with 
any hope of capturing him. I might hail him 
as our poet, for he was born a poet ; they are 
all born so. If he didn't lisp in numbers, it 
was because he spoke plainly at a very early 
age. I might hail him as physician, and a 
long and well-spent life in that profession would 
justify it ; but I don't believe it will ever be 
known whether he has cured more cases of 
dyspepsia and blues by his poems or his pow- 
ders and his pills. I might hail him as pro- 
fessor, and as professor emeritus he has added 
a new wreath to his brow. I might hail him 
as Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, for there 
he had a long reign. He will defend himself 
with courage, for he never showed the 
white feather but once, and that is, that he 
does not dare to be as funny as he can. A 
tough subject, surely, and I must try him on 
the tender side, the paternal. I give you the 
father who went in search of a captain, and, 
finding him, presents to us now his son, the 
judge." 

On rising, Doctor Holmes held up a sheet 
of paper, and said, " You see before you " (refer- 
ring to the paper) "all that you have to fear 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 211 

or hope. For thirty-five years I have taught 
anatomy. I have often heard of the roots of 
the tongue, but I never found them. The dan- 
ger of a tongue let loose you have had oppor- 
tunity to know before, but the danger of a 
scrap of paper like this is so trivial that I 
hardly need to apologize for it." 

His Honor's father yet remains, 

His proud paternal posture firm in; 
But, while his right he still maintains 
To wield the household rod and reins, 

He bows before the filial ermine. 

What curious tales has life in store, 
With all its must-bes and its may-bes ! 

The sage of eighty years and more 

Once crept a nursling on the floor, — 

Kings, conquerors, judges, all were babies. 

The fearless soldier, who has faced 

The serried bayonets' gleam appalling, 
For nothing save a pin misplaced 
The peaceful nursery has disgraced 

With hours of unheroic bawling. 

The mighty monarch, whose renown 

Fills up the stately page historic, 
Has howled to waken half the town, 
And finished off by gulping down 

His castor oil or paregoric. 



212 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

The justice, who, in gown and cap, 
Condemns a wretch to strangulation, 

Has scratched his nurse and spilled his pap ; 

And sprawled across his mother's lap 
For wholesome law's administration. 

Ah, life has many a reef to shun 

Before in port we drop our anchor, 
But when its course is nobly run 
Look aft ! for there the work was done. 
Life owes its headway to the spanker I 

Yon seat of justice well might awe 

The fairest manhood's half-blown summer ; 
There Parsons scourged the laggard law, 
There reigned and ruled majestic Shaw, — 
What ghosts to hail the last new-comer! 

One cause of fear I faintly name, — 

The dread lest duty's dereliction 
Shall give so rarely cause for blame 
Our guileless voters will exclaim, 
"No need of human jurisdiction!" 

What keeps the doctor's trade alive? 

Bad air, bad water; more's the pity! 
But lawyers walk where doctors drive, 
And starve in streets where surgeons thrive, 

Our Boston is so pure a city. 

What call for judge or court, indeed, 

When righteousness prevails so through it 

Our virtuous car-conductors need 

Only a card whereon they read 

" Do right; it's naughty not to do it!" 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 21 B 

The whirligig of time goes round, 

And changes all things but affection ; 
One blessed comfort may be found 
In heaven's broad statute which has bound 

Each household to its head's protection. 

If e'er aggrieved, attacked, accused, 

A sire may claim a son's devotion 
To shield his innocence abused, 
As old Anchises freely used 

His offspring's legs for locomotion. 

You smile. You did not come to weep, 

Nor I my weakness to be showing ; 
And these gay stanzas, slight and cheap, 
Have served their simple use, — to keep 

A father's eyes from overflowing. 

Doctor Holmes' daughter, who bore her 
mother's name, Amelia Jackson, married the 
late John Turner Sargent. In her Sketches 
and Reminiscences of the Radical Club, we have 
some pithy remarks of Doctor Holmes'. To 
speak without premeditation, he says, on a 
carefully written essay, made him feel as he 
should if, at a chemical lecture, somebody should 
pass around a precipitate, and when the mix- 
ture had become turbid should request him to 
give his opinion concerning it. The fallacies 
continually rising in such a discussion from 



214 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

the want of a proper understanding of terms, 
always made him feel as if quicksilver had 
been substituted for the odinary silver of 
speech. The only true way to criticize such 
an essay was to take it home, slowly assimilate 
it, and not talk about it until it had become 
a part of one's self. 

Edward, the youngest son of Doctor Holmes, 
had chosen the same profession as his brother. 

It was at Mrs. Sargent's home, at Beverly 
Farms, that Doctor Holmes passed most of his 
summers. The pretty, cream-colored house, 
with its broad veranda in front, can be easily 
seen from the station ; but to appreciate the 
charms of this pleasant country home, one should 
catch a glimpse of the cosey interior. 

Robert Rantoul, John T. Morse and Henry 
Lee were neighbors of Doctor Holmes at Bev- 
erly Farms, and Lucy Larcom's home was not 
far distant. 

After eighteen years' residence at No. 8 
Montgomery Place, Doctor Holmes moved to 
164 Charles street, where he lived about twelve 
years. His home in Boston was at No. 296 
Beacon street. 

"We die out of houses," says the poet, 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 215 

"just as we die out of our bodies. . . . 
The body has been called the house we live 
in ; the house is quite as much the body we 

live in The soul of a man has a 

series of concentric envelopes around it, like 
the core of an onion, or the innermost of a 
nest of boxes. First, he has his natural gar- 
ment of flesh and blood. Then his artificial 
integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, 
their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their vari- 
ously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be 
it a single chamber or a stately mansion. 
And then the whole visible world, in which 
Time buttons him up as in a loose, outside 
wrapper Our houses shape them- 
selves palpably on our inner and outer nature. 
See a householder breaking up and you will 
be sure of it. There is a shell fish which 
builds all manner of smaller shells into the 
walls of its own. A house is never a home 
until we have crusted it with the spoils of a 
hundred lives besides those of our own past. 
See what these are and you can tell what the 
occupant is." 

The poet's home on Beacon street well illus- 
trates the above extract. I shall not soon forget 



216 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

the charming picture that greeted me, one gray 
winter day, as I was ushered into the poet's 
cheerful study. A blazing wood fire was crack- 
ling on the hearth, and the ruddy glow was 
reflected now on the stately features of " Dorothy 
Q." now on the Copley portrait of old Doctor 
Cooper, and now with a peculiar Rembrandt 
effect upon the low rows of books, the orderly 
desk, and the kind, cordial face of the poet 
himself. An " Emerson Calendar " was hanging 
over the mantel, and after calling my attention 
to the excellent picture upon it of the old 
home at Concord, Doctor Holmes began to 
talk of his brother poet in terms of warmest 
affection. 

As he afterwards remarked at the Nineteenth 
Century Club, the difference between Emer- 
son's poetry and that of others with whom he 
might naturally be compared, was that of alge- 
bra and arithmetic. The fascination of his 
poems was in their spiritual depth and sin- 
cerity and their all pervading symbolism. Em- 
erson's writings in prose and verse were worthy 
of all honor and admiration, but his manhood 
was the noblest of all his high endowments. 
A bigot here and there might have avoided 




^ **s 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 217 

meeting him, but if He who knew what was 
in men had wandered from door to door in 
New England, as of old in Palestine, one of 
the thresholds which " those blessed feet" 
would have crossed would have been that of 
the lovely and quiet home of Emerson. 

The view from the broad bay window in Doc- 
tor Holmes' study, recalled his own description : 

Through my north window, in the wintry weather, 

My airy oriel on the river shore, 
I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together, 

Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar. 

The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen, 
Lets the loose water waft him as it will ; 

The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden, 
Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still. 

A microscopical apparatus placed under an- 
other window in the study, reminds the 
visitor of the " man of science," while the 
books — 

A mingled race, the wreck of chance and time 
That talk all tongues and breathe of every clime — 

speak in eloquent numbers of the " man of 
letters." 



218 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

There is the Plato on the lower shelf, with the 
inscription, Ezra Stiles, 1766, to which Doctor 
Holmes alludes in his tribute to the New England 
clergy. Here is the hand-lens imported by the 
Reverend John Prince, of Salem, and just before 
us, in the "unpretending row of local historians," 
is Jeremy Belknap's History of New Hampshire, 
"in the pages of which," says Doctor Holmes, 
"may be found a chapter contributed in part 
by the most remarkable man in many respects, 
among all the older clergymen, — preacher, law- 
yer, physician, astronomer, botanist, entomologist, 
explorer, colonist, legislator in State and national 
governments, and only not seated on the bench 
of the Supreme Court of a Territory because he 
declined the office when Washington offered it 
to him. This manifold individual," adds Doctor 
Holmes, " was the minister of Hamilton, a pleas- 
ant little town in Essex County, Massachusetts, 
the Reverend Manasseh Cutler." 

Here is the Aetius found one never-to-be-for- 
gotten rainy day, in that dingy bookshop in 
Lyons, and here the vellum-bound Tulpius, "my 
only reading," says Doctor Holmes, M when im- 
prisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the 
two hundred and twenty-eight cases he has 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 219 

recorded are, many of them, to this day still 
fresh in my memory." Here, too, is the Schenck- 
hcs, — "the folio filled with casus rariores, which 
had strayed in among the rubbish of the book- 
stall on the boulevard — and here the noble old 
Vesalins, with its grand frontispiece not unworthy 
of Titian, and the fine old Ambroise Parie, long 
waited for even in Paris and long ago, and the 
colossal Spigelius, with his eviscerated beauties, 
and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of fine 
engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mas- 
cagni, the despair of all would-be imitators, and 
pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian 
Berengarius Carpensis" and many other rare 
volumes, dear to the heart of every bibliophile. 

Glancing again from the window, I catch a 
glimpse of the West Boston Bridge, and recall 
the poet's description of the " crunching of ice 
at the edges of the river as the tide rises and 
falls, the little cluster of tent-like screens on 
the frozen desert, the excitement of watching 
the springy hoops, the mystery of drawing up 
life from silent, unseen depths." With his opera 
glass he watches the boys and men, black and 
white, fishing over the rails of the bridge "as 
hopefully as if the river were full of salmon." 



220 OLIVER W EX DELL HOLMES. 

At certain seasons, he observes, there will 
now and then be captured a youthful and inex- 
perienced codfish, always, however, of quite trivial 
dimensions. The fame of the exploit has no 
sooner gone abroad than the enthusiasts of the 
art come flocking down to the river and cast 
their lines in side by side, until they look like a 
row of harp-strings for number. " That a codfish 
is once in a while caught," says Doctor Holmes, 
" I have asserted to be a fact ; but I have 
often watched the anglers, and do not remember 
ever seeing one drawn from the water, or even 
any unequivocal symptom of a bite. The 
spring sculpin and the flabby, muddy flounder 
are the common rewards of the angler's toil. 

The silhouette figures on the white back- 
ground enliven the winter landscape, but now 
the blazing log on the hearthstone rolls over 
and the whole study is aglow with light ! Truly 
" winter is a cheerful season to people who have 
open fireplaces;" and who will not agree with 
our poet-philosopher when he says, " A house 
without these is like a face without eyes, and 
that never smiles. I have seen respectability 
and amiability grouped over the air-tight stove ; 
I have seen virtue and intelligence hovering 




Dr. Holmes' Library, Beacon St. 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 221 

over the register ; but I have never seen true 
happiness in a family circle where the faces 
were not illuminated by the blaze of an open 
fireplace." 

A well-known journalist writes as follows of 
Doctor Holmes " at home." 

"All who pay their respects to the distin- 
guished Autocrat will find the genial, merry 
gentleman whose form and kindly greeting all 
admirers have anticipated while reading his 
sparkling poems. He is the perfect essence of 
wit and hospitality — courteous, amiable and 
entertaining to a degree which is more easily 
remembered than imparted or described. If 
the caller expects to find blue-blood snobbish- 
ness at 296 Beacon street, he will be disap- 
pointed. It is one of the most elegant and 
charming residences on that broad and fashion- 
able thoroughfare, but far less pretentious, both 
inwardly and outwardly, than many of the 
others. For an uninterrupted period of forty- 
seven years, Doctor Holmes has lived in 
Boston, and for the last dozen years he has 
occupied his present residence on Beacon 
street. 

"The chief point of attraction in the present 



222 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

residence — for the visitor as well as the host — 
is the magnificent and spacious library, which 
may be more aptly termed the Autocrat's work- 
shop. It is up one flight, and seemingly occu- 
pies the entire rear half of the whole build- 
ing on this floor. It is a very inviting room 
in every respect, and from the spacious win- 
dows overlooking the broad expanse of the 
Charles River, there can be had an extensive 
view of the surrounding suburbs in the north- 
erly, eastern and western directions. On a 
clear day there can be more or less distinctly 
described the cities and towns of Cambridge, 
Arlington, Medford, Somerville, Maiden, Revere, 
Everett, Chelsea, Charlestown and East Boston. 
Even in the picture can be recognized the 
lofty tower of the Harvard Memorial Hall, 
which is but a few steps from the doctor's 
birthplace and first home. Arthur Gilman, in 
his admirable pen and pencil sketches of the 
homes of the American poets, makes a happy 
and appropriate allusion to the Autocrat's library. 
'The ancient Hebrew,' he says, 'always had a 
window open toward Jerusalem, the city about 
which his most cherished hopes and memories 
clustered, and this window gives its owner the 



THE HOME CIRCLE, 223 

pleasure of looking straight to the place of 
his birth, and thus of freshening all the happy 
memories of a successful life.' 

" In renewing his old-time acquaintance with 
the Atlantic family circle, the Autocrat recog- 
nized the modern invention of the journalistic 
interviewer, and submitted some plans for his 
regulation, to be considered by the various 
local governments. His idea is that the inter- 
viewer is a product of our civilization, one 
who does for the living what the undertaker 
does for the dead, taking such liberties as he 
chooses with the subject of his mental and 
conversational manipulations, whom he is to 
arrange for public inspection. ' The interview 
system has its legitimate use,' says Doctor 
Holmes, ' and is often a convenience to pol- 
iticians, and may even gratify the vanity and 
serve the interests of an author.' He very 
properly believes, however, that in its abuse it 
is an infringement of the liberty of the private 
citizen to be ranked with the edicts of the 
council of ten, the decrees of the star cham- 
ber, the lettres de cachet, and the visits of 
the Inquisition. The interviewer, if excluded, 
becomes an enemy, and has the columns of a 



224 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

newspaper at his service in which to revenge 
himself. If admitted, the interviewed is at the 
mercy of the interviewer's memory, if he is 
the best meaning of men ; of his accuracy, if 
he is careless ; of his malevolence, if he is 
ill-disposed ; of his prejudices, if he has any. 
and of his sense of propriety, at any rate. 

"Doctor Holmes humorously suggests the fol- 
lowing restrictions : ' A licensed corps of in- 
terviewers, to be appointed by the municipal 
authorities, each interviewer to wear, in a 
conspicuous position, a number and a badge, 
for which the following emblems and inscrip- 
tions are suggested : Zephyrus, with his lips 
at the ear of Boreas, who holds a speaking 
trumpet, signifying that what is said by the 
interviewed in a whisper will be shouted to the 
world by the interviewer through that brazen 
instrument. For mottoes, either of the follow- 
ing: Fcenum Jialct in cornu ; Huuc tu Roman c 
caveto. No person to be admitted to the 
corps of interviewers without a strict pre- 
liminary examination. The candidate to be 
proved free from color blindness and ambly- 
opia, ocular and mental strabismus, double 
refraction of memory, kleptomania, mendacity 



THE HOME CIRCLE. 225 

of more than average dimensions, and ten- 
dency to alcholic endosmosis. His moral and 
religious character to be vouched for by three 
orthodox clergymen of the same belief, and 
as many deacons who agree with them and 
each other. All reports to be submitted to 
the interviewed, and the proofs thereof to be 
corrected and sanctioned by him before being 
given to the public. Until the above provi- 
sions are carried out no record of an alleged 
interview to be considered as anything more 
than the untrustworthy gossip of an irrespon- 
sible impersonality.' " 

"What business have young scribblers to 
send me their verses and ask my opinion of 
the stuff ? " said Doctor Holmes one day, 
annoyed by the officiousness of certain would- 
be aspirants to literary fame. "They have 
no more right to ask than they have to 
stop me on the street, run out their tongues, 
and ask what the matter is with their 
stomachs, and what they shall take as a 
remedy." At another time he made the re- 
mark : " Everybody that writes a book must 
needs send me a copy. It's very good 
of them, of course, but they're not all sue- 



226 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

cessful attempts at bookmaking, and most of 
them are relegated to my hospital for sick 
books up-stairs." 

But once a young writer sent from Cali- 
fornia a sample of his poetry, and asked 
Holmes if it was worth while for him to 
keep on writing. It was evident that the 
doctor was impressed by something decidedly 
original in the style of the writer, for he 
wrote back that he should keep on, by all 
means. 

Some time afterward a gentleman called at 
the home of Professor Holmes in Boston and 
asked him if he remembered the incident. 
"I do, indeed," replied Holmes. "Well," said 
his visitor, who was none other than Bret 
Harte, " I am the man." 



LOVE OF NATURE. 227 



CHAPTER XVII. 



LOVE OF NATURE. 



IT is city-life, Boston-life, in fact, that forms 
the fitting frame of any pen-picture one 
might draw of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and yet 
even his prose writings are full of all a poet's 
love for country sights and sounds. Listen, for 
instance, to this rich word-picture of the opening 
spring : " A flock of wild geese wedging their 
way northward, with strange, far-off clamor, are 
the heralds of April ; the flowers are opening 
fast ; the leaves are springing bright green upon 
the currant bushes ; dark, almost livid, upon the 
lilacs ; the grass is growing apace, the plants 
are coming up in the garden beds, and the chil- 
dren are thinking of May-day. 

"The birds come pouring in with May. 
Wrens, brown thrushes, the various kinds of swal- 
lows, orioles, cat-birds, golden robins, bobo'links, 
whippoorwills, cuckoos, yellow-birds, humming- 



228 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

birds, are busy in establishing their new house- 
holds. The bumble-bee comes in with his ' mel- 
low, breezy bass,' to swell the song of the busy 
minstrels. 

"And now June comes in with roses in her 

hand the azalea — wild honeysuckle 

— is sweetening the road-sides; the laurels are 
beginning to blow, the white lilies are getting 
ready to open, the fireflies are seen now and 
then flitting across the darkness ; the katydids, 
the grasshoppers, the crickets, make themselves 
heard ; the bull-frogs utter their tremendous 
voices, and the full chorus of birds makes the 
air vocal with melody." 

How like Thoreau the following passage 
reads : 

" O, for a huckleberry pasture to wander in, 
with labyrinths of taller bushes, with bayberry 
leaves at hand to pluck and press and smell of, 
and sweet fern, its fragrant rival, growing near ! 
. . . . I wonder if others have noticed what 
an imitative fruit the blackberry is. I have tasted 
the strawberry, the pine-apple, and I do not know 
how many other flavors in it — if you think a lit- 
tle, and have read Darwin, and Huxley, perhaps 
you will believe that it, and all the fruits it 



LOVE OF NATURE. 229 

tastes of, may have come from a common pro- 
genitor." 

And there is the poet's beautiful picture of 
Indian summer. 

" It is the time to be in the woods or on 
the seashore, — a sweet season that should be 
given to lonely walks, to stumbling about in old 
churchyards, plucking on the way the aromatic 
silvery herb everlasting, and smelling at its dry 
flower until it etherizes the soul into aimless rev- 
eries outside of space and time. There is little 
need of painting the still, warm, misty, dreamy 
Indian summer in words ; there are many states 
that have no articulate vocabulary, and are only 
to be reproduced by music, and the mood this 
season produces is of that nature. By and by, 
when the white man is thoroughly Indianized 
(if he can bear the process), some native Hay- 
den will perhaps turn the Indian summer into 
the loveliest andante of the new 'Creation.'" 

And again : " To those who know the Indian 
summer of our Northern States, it is needless to 
describe the influence it exerts on the senses 
and the soul. The stillness of the landscape 
in that beautiful time is as if the planet were 
sleeping like a top, before it begins to rock with 



230 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

the storms of autumn. All natures seem to find 
themselves more truly in its light ; love grows 
more tender, religion more spiritual, memory 
sees farther back into the past, grief revisits its 
mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe 
thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verse 
by his winter fireside." 

At another time, when revisiting the scenes of 
his old schooldays at Andover, he gives us the 
following vivid description of mountain scenery : 

" Far to the north and west the mountains of 
New Hampshire lifted their summits in a long 
encircling ridge of pale-blue waves. The day 
was clear, and every mound and peak traced its 
outline with perfect definition against the sky. 
. . . . I have been by the seaside now and 
then, but the sea is constantly busy with its 
own affairs, running here and there, listening to 
what the winds have to say, and getting angry 
with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and 
ready to do a mischief to those who seek its 
companionship. But these still, serene, unchang- 
ing mountains, — Monadnock, Kearsarge, — what 
memories that name recalls! and the others, the 
dateless Pyramids of New England, the eternal 
monuments of her ancient race, around which 



LOVE OF NATURE. 231 

cluster the homes of so many of her bravest 
and hardiest children, I can never look at them 
without feeling that, vast and remote and awful 
as they are, there is a kind of inward heat and 
muffled throb in their stony cores, that brings 
them into a vague sort of sympathy with human 
hearts. How delightful all those reminiscences, 
as he wanders, " the ghost of a boy " by his side, 
now by the old elm that held, buried in it by 
growth, iron rings to keep the Indians from de- 
stroying it with their tomahawks ; and now 
through the old playground sown with memories 
of the time when he was young. 

"A kind of romance gilds for me," he says, 
"the sober tableland of that cold New England 
hill where I came a slight, immature boy, in 
contact with a world so strange to me, and des- 
tined to leave such mingled and lasting impres- 
sions. I looked across the valley to the hillside 
where Methuen hung suspended, and dreamed of 
its wooded seclusion as a village paradise. I 
tripped lightly down the long northern slope 
with facilis descensus on my lips, and toiled up 
again, repeating sed revocare gradiun. I wan- 
dered in the autumnal woods that crown the 
1 Indian Ridge,' much wondering at that vast 



232 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

enbankment, which we young philosophers be- 
lieved with the vulgar to be of aboriginal work- 
manship, not less curious, perhaps, since we call 
it an escar, and refer it to alluvial agencies. 
The little Shawsheen was our swimming-school, 
and the great Merrimac, the right arm of four 
toiling cities, was within reach of a morning 
stroll." 

Nor does he forget to recall a visit to Haver- 
hill with his room-mate, when he saw the mighty 
bridge over the Merrimac that defied the ice- 
rafts of the river, and the old meeting-house 
door with the bullet-hole in it, through which 
the minister, Benjamin Rolfe, was shot by the 
Indians. " What a vision it was," he exclaims, 
" when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on 
the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers 
and spires of a great city ! for such was my fancy, 
and whether it was a mirage of youth, or a fan- 
tastic natural effect, I hate to inquire too nicely." 

Like all poets, Doctor Holmes had a passionate 
love for flowers, and with a delight that is most 
heartily shared by the sympathetic reader, he 
thus recalls the old garden belonging to the gam- 
brel-roofed house in Cambridge . 

"There were old lilac bushes, at the right of 



LOVE OF NATURE. 233 

the entrance, and in the corner at the left that 
remarkable moral pear-tree, which gave me one 
of my first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened 
but always rotted at the core just before it began 
to grow mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian speci- 
men, at best, and was set there, no doubt, only to 
preach its annual sermon, a sort of ' Dudleian Lec- 
ture ' by a country preacher of small parts. But 
in the northern border was a high-bred Saint 
Michael pear-tree, which taught a lesson that all of 
gentle blood might take to heart ; for its fruit used 
to get hard and dark, and break into unseemly 
cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest came 
for it, it was like those rich men's sons we see 
too often, who have never ripened, but only 
rusted, hardened and shrunken. We had 
peaches, lovely nectarines, and sweet, white 
grapes, growing and coming to kindly maturity 
in those days; we should hardly expect them 
now, and yet there is no obvious change of cli- 
mate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared 
for by the Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, 
sometimes assisted by one Rule, a little old 
Scotch gardener, with a stippled face and a lively 
temper. Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in 
them — hyacinths, pushing their green beaks 



^34 OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 

through as soon as the snow was gone, or earlier 
tulips, coming up in the shape of sugar * cockles,' 
or cornucopias, one was almost tempted to 
look to see whether nature had not packed 
one of those two-line 'sentiments,' we remem- 
ber so well in each of them ; peonies, butting 
their way bluntly through the loosened 
earth ; flower-de-luces (so I will call them, not 
otherwise) ; lilies ; roses, damask, white, blush, 
cinnamon (these names served us then) ; lark- 
spurs, lupins, and gorgeous holyhocks. 

" With these upper-class plants were blended, 
in republican fellowship, the useful vegetables of 
the working sort; — beets, handsome with 
dark-red leaves; carrots, with their elegant 
filigree foliage, parsnips that cling to the earth 
like mandrakes ; radishes, illustrations of total 
depravity, a prey to every evil underground 
emissary of the powers of darkness ; onions, 
never easy until they are out of bed, so to 
speak, a communicative and companionable veg- 
etable, with a real genius for soups ; squash 
vines with their generous fruits, the winter ones 
that will hang up ' ag'in the chimbly ' by and 
by — the summer ones, vase like, as Haw- 
thorne described them, with skins so white 



LOVE OF NATURE. 235 

and delicate, when they are yet new-born, that 
one thinks of little sucking pigs turned vege- 
tables, like Daphne into a laurel, and then 
of tender human infancy, which Charles Lamb's 
favorite so calls to mind;— these, with mel- 
ons, promising as ' first scholars,' but apt to put 
off ripening until the frost came and blasted 
their vines and leaves, as if it had been a 
shower of boiling water, were among the cus- 
tomary growths of the Garden." 

Then follows, in these charming reminiscences, 
an account of the reconstruction of the dear 
old Garden. 

"Consuls Madisonius and Monrovious left the 
seat of office, and Consuls Johannes Quincius, and 
Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed 
in their turn, until the good Abraham sat in 
the curule chair. In the meantime changes 
had been going on under our old gambrel roof, 
and the Garden had been suffered to relapse 
slowly into a state of wild nature. The 
haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, 
the perfumed roses, had yielded their place to 
suckers from locust-trees, to milkweed, burdock, 
plantain, sorrel, purslane ; the gravel walks, 
which were to nature as rents in her green 



236 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

garment, had been gradually darned over with 
the million threaded needles of her grasses until 
nothing was left to show that a garden had 
been there. 

" But the Garden still existed in my mem- 
ory ; the walks were all mapped out there, 
and the place of every herb and flower was 
laid down as if on a chart. 

" By that pattern I reconstructed the Gar- 
den, lost for a whole generation as much as 
Pompeii was lost, and in the consulate of our 
good Abraham it was once more as it had 
been in the days of my childhood. It was 
not much to look upon for a stranger; but 
when the flowers came up in their old places, 
the effect on me was something like what 
the widow of Nain may have felt when her 
dead son rose on his bier and smiled upon 
her. 

" Nature behaved admirably, and sent me 
back all the little tokens of her affection she 
had kept so long. The same delegates from 
the underground fauna ate up my early rad- 
ishes ; I think I should have been disap- 
pointed if they had not. The same buff-colored 
bugs devoured my roses that I remembered of 



LOVE OF NATURE. 237 

old. The aphis and the caterpillar and the 
squash-btig were cordial as ever; just as if 
nothing had happened to produce a coolness 
or entire forgetfulness between us. But the 
butterflies came back too, and the bees and 
the birds." 

Says a well-known writer : 

li Though born and reared beneath the shadow 
of the great city, yet Doctor Holmes has ever 
found great delight in spending a portion of 
each year in the country. The last few sum- 
mers he has made his home at Beverly Farms, 
but from 1849 to 1856, inclusive, his summer 
home was in Pittsfield, in Berkshire County. 
His recollections of the scenes and people in 
that charming town are pleasant and abundant. 
The villa which he built was upon a round 
knoll, commanding a fine view of the whole 
circle of Berkshire mountains, and of the Housa- 
tonic, winding in its serpentine way through 
the fertile meadows and valleys to the sound 
of Long Island. Yielding to his own good 
nature and the soft persuasion of a committee 
of Pittsfield ladies, Doctor Holmes once con- 
tributed a couple of poems to a fancy fair 
which was being held in the town during his 



238 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

residence there. They do not appear in any 
of the published collections, which is the one 
reason, above all others, why we print them 
now. Each of the poems was inclosed in an 
envelope bearing a motto ; and the right to a 
second choice, guided by these, was disposed 
of in a raffle, to the no small emolument of 
the objects of the fair. The two pieces are 
even to this day represented by at least a 
square yard of the quaint ecclesiastical her- 
aldry which illuminates the gorgeous chancel 
window of the St. Stephen's church in Pitts- 
field. The motto of the first envelope ran thus : 

Faith is the conquering angels' crown; 

Who hopes for grace must ask it; 
Look shrewdly ere you lay me down ; 

I'm Portia's leaden casket. 

The following verses were found within : 

Fair lady, whosoe'er thou art, 
Turn this poor leaf with tenderest care, 

And — hush, oh, hush thy beating heart; 
The one thou lovest will be there. 

Alas, not loved by thee alone, 

Thine idol ever prone to range; 
To-day all thine, to-morrow flown, 

Frail thing, that every hour may change. 



LOVE OF NATURE. 239 

Yet, when that truant course is done, 

If thy lost wanderer reappear, 
Press to thy heart the only one 

That nought can make more truly dear. 

Within this paper was a smaller envelope 
containing a one dollar bill, and this explana- 
tion of the poet's riddle: 

Fair lady, lift thine eyes and tell 

If this is not a truthful letter; 
This is the ( i ) thou lovest well, 

And nought (o) can make thee love it better (10)- 

Though fickle, do not think it strange 
That such a friend is worth possessing; 

For one that gold can never change 
Is Heaven's own dearest earthly blessing. 



240 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 

UPON the seventeenth of October, 1883, the 
centennial anniversary of the Harvard 
Medical School, the new building upon the 
Back Bay was dedicated. The fine, commo- 
dious structure is situated upon the corner 
of Boylston and Exeter streets, and is at 
nearly equal distances from the Massachusetts 
General Hospital, the City Hospital, the Bos- 
ton Dispensary and the Children's Hospital 
with their stores of clinical material, available 
for the purposes of teaching. Close by, also, 
are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
the museums of the Society of Natural His- 
tory and of Fine Arts, and the Medical Li- 
brary Association. The building has a front- 
age of one hundred and twenty-two feet 
toward the north on Boylston street, and of 
ninety feet toward the west on Exeter street, 






THE HARVAED MEDICAL SCHOOL. 241 

and its corner position, together with the 
reservation of a large open area on the east, 
will always insure good light and good air. 

The dedication exercises were divided into 
two parts, the opening addresses being given 
in Huntington Hall, at the Institute of Tech- 
nology, and the remainder of the programme 
in the new building. Upon the platform, in 
Huntington Hall, were seated President Eliot, 
of Harvard University, the faculty of the 
Medical School, and numerous invited guests. 
Upon the walls just back of the platform, 
against a background of maroon-colored dra- 
pery, and directly over the head of the origi- 
nal, hung a portrait of Professor Oliver Wen- 
dell Holmes. Beneath this portrait was a fine 
marble bust of Professor Henry J. Bigelow, 
who was seated beside Doctor Holmes. 

President Eliot opened the exercises with 
the interesting address which follows: 

"We are met to celebrate the beginning of 
the second century of the Medical School's 
existence, and the simultaneous completion of 
its new building. It is a hundred years since 
John Warren, Benjamin Waterhouse and Aaron 
Dexter were installed as professors of anatomy 



242 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

and surgery, theory and practice, and materia 
medica respectively, and without the aid of 
collections or hospitals began to lecture in 
some small, rough rooms in the basement of 
Harvard Hall, and in a part of little Holden 
Chapel, at Cambridge. From that modest 
beginning the school has gradually grown until 
it counts a staff of forty-seven teachers, ten 
professors, six assistant professors, nine in- 
structors, thirteen clinical instructors, and 
nine assistants — working in the spacious and 
well-equipped building, which we are shortly 
to inspect, and commanding every means of 
instruction and research which laboratories, 
dispensaries and hospitals can supply. Out 
of our present strength and abundance we 
look back to the founding of the school 
and to its slow and painful development. We 
bear in our hearts the three generations of 
teachers who have served this school with 
disinterested diligence and zeal. We recall 
their unrequited labors, their frequent anxieties 
and conflicts and their unfulfilled hopes ; we 
bring to mind the careful plantings and the 
tardy harvests, reaped at last, but not by 
them that sowed. We meet, indeed, to rejoice 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 243 

in present prosperity and fair prospects, but 
we would first salute our predecessors and 
think with reverence and gratitude of their 
toils and sacrifices, the best fruits of which our 
generation has inherited. 

" The medical faculty of to-day have strong 
grounds for satisfaction in the present state of 
the school ; for they have made great changes 
in its general plan and policy, run serious 
risks, received hearty support from the pro- 
fession and the community, and now see their 
efforts crowned with substantial success. By 
doubling the required period of study in each 
year of the course, instituting an admission 
examination, strengthening the examinations at 
the end of each year, and establishing a 
voluntary fourth year of instruction, which 
clearly indicates that the real standard of the 
faculty cannot be reached in three years, they 
have taken step after step to increase their 
own labors, make the attainment of the degree 
more difficult, and diminish the resort of 
students to the school. They have deliberately 
sacrificed numbers in their determination to 
improve the quality of the graduates of the 
school. At the same time they have success- 



244 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

fully carried out an improvement in medical 
education which required large expenditures. 
This improvement is the partial substitution, 
by every student, of personal practice in lab- 
oratories for work upon books, and attendance 
at lectures. The North Grove street building, 
erected in 1846-47, contained only one small 
laboratory for students, that of anatomy. The 
new building contains a students' laboratory 
for each of the five fundamental subjects — 
anatomy, physiology, chemistry, histology and 
pathology — and that a large part of the 
building is devoted to these working rooms. 
It was a grave question whether the profes- 
sion, the community and the young men who 
year by year aspire to become physicians and 
surgeons would support the faculty in making 
these improvements. The answer can now be 
recorded. 

"The school has received by gift and bequest 
three hundred and twenty thousand dollars in 
ten years ; it has secured itself in the centre 
of the city for many years to come by the 
timely purchase of a large piece of land ; it 
has paid about two hundred and twenty thousand 
dollars for a spacious, durable and well-arranged 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 245 

building ; it has increased its annual expendi- 
ture for salaries of teachers from twenty thou- 
sand dollars in 1871-72,10 thirty-six thousand 
dollars in 1882-83; its receipts have exceeded 
its expenses in every year since 1871-72, and 
its invested funds now exceed those of 1871 
by more than one hundred thousand dollars. 
At the same time the school has become a 
centre of chemical, physiological, histological 
and sanitary research, as well as a place for 
thorough instruction ; its students bring to the 
school a better education than ever before ; they 
work longer and harder while in the school, 
and leave it prepared, so far as sound training 
can prepare them to enter, not the over-crowded 
lower ranks of the profession, but the higher, 
where there is always room. 

"The faculty recognize that the generosity of 
the community and the confidence of the 
students impose upon them reciprocal obliga- 
tions. They gladly acknowledge themselves 
bound to teach with candor and enthusiasm, 
to observe and study with diligence that they 
may teach always better and better, to illus- 
trate before their students the pure scientific 
spirit, and to hold all their attainments and 



246 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

discoveries at the service of mankind. Certainly 
the medical faculty have good reason to ask 
to-day for the felicitations of the profession and 
the public. 

" Nevertheless, the governors, teachers, gradu- 
ates and friends of this school have no thought 
of resting contented with its present condition. 
Instructed by its past, they have faith in its 
future. They hope they know that the best 
fruits of their labors will be reaped by later 
generations. The medical profession is fortunate 
among the learned professions in that a fresh 
and boundless field of unimaginable fertility 
spreads out before it. Its conquests to come 
are infinitely greater than those already achieved. 
The great powers of chemistry and physics, 
themselves all new, have only just now been 
effectively employed in the service of medicine 
and surgery. The zoologist, entomologist, vet- 
erinarian and sanitarian have just begun to 
contribute effectively to the progress of medi- 
cine. 

"The great achievements of this century in 
medical science and the healing art are all 
prophetic. Thus, the measurable deliverance 
of mankind from small-pox is an earnest of 



THE HARVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 247 

deliverance from measles, scarlatina, and ty- 
phoid fever. Within forty years anaesthetics and 
antiseptics have quadrupled the chances of 
success in grave surgical operations and have 
extended indefinitely the domain of warrantable 
surgery ; but in value far beyond all the 
actual benefits which have thus far accrued 
to mankind from these discoveries is the clear 
prophecy they utter of greater blessing to 
come. A medical school must needs be al- 
ways expecting new wonders. 

" How is medical science to be advanced ? 
First, by the devoted labors of men, young 
and old, who give their lives to medical obser- 
vations, research and teaching; secondly, by 
the gradual aggregation in safe hands of per- 
manent endowments for the promotion of 
medical science and of the sciences upon which 
medicine rests. Neither of these springs of 
progress is to fail us here. Modern society 
produces the devoted student of science as 
naturally and inevitably as mediaeval society 
produced the monk. Enthusiastic devotion to 
unworldly ends has not diminished; it only 
manifests itself in new directions. So, too, 
benevolence and public spirit, when diverted 






248 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

by the teachings of both natural and political 
science from many of the ancient forms of 
benevolent activity, have simply found new and 
better modes of action. 

" With thankfulness for the past, with reason- 
able satisfaction in the present, and with joy- 
ful hope in the future, the medical faculty 
celebrate this anniversary festival, welcoming 
their guests, thanking their benefactors, and 
exchanging with their colleagues, their students, 
and the governing boards mutual congratu- 
lations and good wishes as the school sets 
bravely out upon its second century." 

At the close of his address President Eliot 
turned to the large audience, and said : 

" I have now the pleasure of presenting to 
you our oldest professor and our youngest ; 
our man of science, and our man of letters ; 
our teacher and our friend, Doctor Holmes." 

From the delightful and characteristic address 
of Doctor Holmes, we are permitted to give 
the following extracts : 

"We are in the habit of counting a gener- 
ation as completed in thirty years, but two 
lives cover a whole century by an easy act 
of memory. I, who am now addressing you, 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 249 

distinctly remember the Boston practitioner 
who walked among the dead after the battle of 
Bunker Hill, and pointed out the body of 
Joseph Warren among the heaps of the slain. 
Look forward a little while from that time 
to the period at which this medical school 
was founded. Eight years had passed since 
John Jeffries was treading the bloody turf on 
yonder hillside. The independence of the 
United States had just been recognized by 
Great Britain. The lessons of the war 
were fresh in the minds of those who had 
served as military surgeons. They knew what 
anatomical knowledge means to the man called 
upon to deal with every form of injury to 
every organ of the body. They knew what 
fever and dysentery are in the camp, and 
what skill is needed by those who have to 
treat the diseases more fatal than the conflicts 
of the battlefield. They know also, and too 
well, how imperfectly taught were most of 
those to whom the health of the whole com- 
munity was entrusted 

" And now I will ask you to take a stride of 
half a century, from the year 1733 to the year 
1833. Of this l ast date I can speak from my 



250 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

own recollection. In April, 1833, I had been 
more than two years a medical student attend- 
ing the winter lectures of this school, and 
have therefore a vivid recollection of the pro- 
fessors of that day. I will only briefly charac- 
terize them by their various merits, not so 
much troubling myself about what may have 
been their short-comings. The shadowy pro- 
cession moves almost visibly by me as I 
speak : John Collins Warren, a cool and skil- 
ful operator, a man of unshaken nerves, of 
determined purpose, of stern ambition, equipped 
with a fine library, but remarkable quite as 
much for knowledge of the world as for 
erudition, and keeping a steady eye on pro- 
fessional and social distinctions, which he 
attained and transmitted. 

" James Jackson, a man of serene and clear 
intelligence, well instructed, not over book-fed, 
truthful to the centre, a candid listener to all 
opinions ; a man who forgot himself in his 
care for others and his love for his profession ; 
by common consent recognized as a model of 
the wise and good physician. Jacob Bigelow, 
more learned, far more various in gifts and 
acquirements than any of his colleagues ; shrewd, 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 251 

inventive, constructive, questioning, patient in 
forming' opinions, steadfast in maintaining them; 
a man of infinite good nature, of ready wit, 
of a keen sense of humor, and a fine literary 
taste ; one of the most accomplished of Amer- 
ican physicians ; I do not recall the name of 
one who could be considered his equal in all 
respects. Walter Channing, meant by nature 
for a man of letters, like his brothers, William 
Ellery and Edward ; vivacious, full of anec- 
dote, ready to make trial of new remedies, with 
the open and receptive intelligence belonging 
to his name as a birthright ; esteemed in his 
specialty by those who called on him in 
emergencies. The professor of chemistry of that 
day was pleasant in the lecture room ; rather 
nervous and excitable, I should say, and judi- 
ciously self-conservative when an explosion was 
a part of the programme." 

Speaking of the new building, Doctor Holmes 
said : 

" You will enter or look into more amphi- 
theatres and lecture-rooms than you might have 
thought were called for. But if you knew 
what it is to lecture and be lectured to, in 
a room just emptied of its preceding audience, 



252 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

you would be thankful that any arrangement 
should prevent such an evil. The experimental 
physiologists tell us that a bird will live under 
a bell glass until he has substituted a large 
amount of carbonic acid for oxygen in the air 
of the bell glass. But if another bird is taken 
from the open air and put in with the first, 
the new-comer speedily dies. So when the 
class I was lecturing to, was sitting in an 
atmosphere once breathed already, after I have 
seen head after head gently declining, and one 
pair of eyes after another emptying themselves 
of intelligence, I have said, inaudibly, with the con- 
siderate self-restraint of Musidora's rural lover : 

" ' Sleep on, dear youth ; this does not mean 
that you are indolent, or that I am dull ; it 
is the partial coma of commencing asphyxia.' 

"You will see extensive apartments destined 
for the practical study of chemistry and of 
physiology. But these branches are no longer 
studied as of old, by merely listening to lec- 
tures. The student must himself perform the 
analyses which he used to hear about. He 
must not be poisoned at his work, and there- 
fore he will require a spacious and well-venti- 
lated room to work in. You read but the 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 253 

other day of an esteemed fellow-citizen who 
died from inhaling the vapors of a broken 
demijohn of a corrosive acid. You will be glad 
to see that every precaution is taken to insure 
the safety and health of our students. 

''Physiology, as now studied, involves the use 
of much delicate and complex machinery. 
You may remember the balance at which 
Sanctorius sat at his meals, so that when he 
had taken in a certain number of ounces the 
lightened table and more heavily weighted 
philosopher gently parted company. You have 
heard, perhaps, of Pettenkofer's chamber, by 
means of which all the living processes of a 
human body are made to declare the total 
consumption and product during a given period. 
Food and fuel supplied ; work done. Never 
was the human body as a machine so under- 
stood, never did it give such an account of 
itself, as it now does in the legible hand- 
writing of the cardiograph, the sphygmograph, 
the myograph, and other self-registering contriv- 
ances, with all of which the student of to-day 
is expected to be practically familiar. 

Among 

the various apartments destined to special 



254 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

uses one will be sure to rivet your attention ; 
namely, the Anthorpotomic Laboratory, known 
to plainer speech as the dissecting room. The 
most difficult work of a medical school is the 
proper teaching of practical anatomy. The 
pursuit of that vitally essential branch of pro- 
fessional knowledge has always been in the 
face of numerous obstacles. Superstition has 
arrayed all her hobgoblins against it. Popular 
prejudice has made the study embarrassing and 
even dangerous to those engaged in it. The 
surgical student was prohibited from obtaining 
the knowledge required in his profession, and 
the surgeon was visited with crushing pen- 
alties for want of that necessary knowledge. 
Nothing is easier than to excite the odium 
of the ignorant against this branch of in- 
struction and those who are engaged in it. 
It is the duty and interest of all intelligent 
members of the community to defend the 
anatomist and his place of labor against such 
appeals to ignorant passion as will interfere 
with tli is part of medical education, above all, 
against such inflammatory representations as 
may be expected to lead to mid-day mobs or 
midnight incendiarism. 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 255 

"The enlightened legislation of Massachusetts 
has long sanctioned the practice of dissection, 
and provided means for supporting the needs 
of anatomical instruction, which managed with 
decent privacy and discretion, have served the 
beneficent purpose intended by the wise and 
humane law-givers, without doing wrong to 
those natural sensibilities which are always to 
be respected. 

" During the long period in which I have 
been a professor of anatomy in this medical 
school, I have had abundant opportunities of 
knowing the zeal, the industry, the intelli- 
gence, the good order and propriety with which 
this practical department has been carried on. 
The labors superintended by the demonstrator 
and his assistants are in their nature repulsive, 
and not free from risk of diseases, though in 
both these respects modern chemistry has 
introduced great ameliorations. The student 
is breathing an air which unused senses would 
find insufferable. He has tasks to perform 
which the chambermaid and the stable-boy 
would shrink from undertaking. We cannot 
wonder that the sensitive Rousseau could not 
endure the atmosphere of the room in which 



25ft OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

he had began a course of anatomical study. 
But we know that the great painters, Michael 
Angelo, Leonardo and Raphael must have wit- 
nessed many careful dissections ; and what they 
endured for art our students can endure for 
science and humanity. 

"Among the large number of students who 
have worked in the department of which I am 
speaking during my long term of service — 
nearly two thousand are on the catalogue as 
students — there must have been some who 
were thoughtless, careless, unmindful of the 
proprieties. Something must be pardoned to 
the hardening effect of habit. Something must 
be forgiven to the light-heartedness of youth, 
which shows itself in scenes that would sadden 
and solemnize the unseasoned visitor. Even 
youthful womanhood has been known to forget 
itself in the midst of solemn surroundings. I 
well remember the complaint of Willis, a lover 
of the gentle sex, and not likely to have told 
a lie against a charming young person ; I quote 
from my rusty memory, but I believe correctly : 



She trifled ! ay, that angel maid, 
She trilled where the dead was laid. 



THE HARVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 257 

"Nor are older persons always so thoughtful 
and serious in the presence of mortality as it 
might be supposed they would show them- 
selves. Some of us have encountered Congres- 
sional committees attending the remains of 
distinguised functionaries to their distant place 
of burial. They generally bore up well under 
their bereavement. One might have expected 
to find them gathered in silent groups in the 
parlors of the Continental Hotel or the Brevoort 
House ; to meet the grief-stricken members of 
the party smileless and sobbing as they sadly 
paced the corridors of Parker's, before they set 
off in a mournful and weeping procession. It 
was not so ; Candor would have to confess 
that it was far otherwise ; Charity would sug- 
gest that Curiosity should withdraw her eye 
from the key-hole ; Humanity would try to 
excuse what she could not help witnessing ; 
and a tear would fall from the blind eye of 
oblivion and blot out their hotel bills forever. 

"You need not be surprised, then, if among 
this large number of young men there should 
have been now and then something to find 
fault with. Twice in the course of thirty-five 
years I have had occasion to rebuke the acts 



258 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

of individual students, once in the presence of 
the whole class on the human and manly sym- 
pathy of which I could always safely rely. I 
have been in the habit of considering myself 
at liberty to visit the department I am speaking 
of, though it had its own officers ; I took a 
part in drawing up the original regulations 
which governed the methods of work ; I have 
often found fault with individuals or small 
classes for a want of method and neatness 
which is too common in all such places. But 
in the face of all peccadilloes and of the idle 
and baseless stories which have been circulated, 
I will say, as if from the chair I no longer 
occupy, that the management of the difficult, 
delicate and all important branch committed to 
the care of a succession of laborious and consci- 
entious demonstrators, as I have known it 
through more than the third of a century, has 
been discreet, humane, faithful, and that the 
record of that department is most honorable to 
them and to the classes they have instructed. 
" But there are better things to think of and 
to speak of than the false and foolish stories 
to which we have been forced to listen. 
While the pitiable attempt has been making to 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 259 

excite the feelings of the ignorant against the 
school of the university, hundreds of sufferers 
throughout Christendom — throughout civiliza- 
tion — have been blessing the name of Boston 
and the Harvard Medical School as the source 
from which relief has reached them for one 
of the gravest injuries, and for one of the 
most distressing of human maladies. I wit- 
nessed many of the experiments by which the 
great surgeon who lately filled a chair in Har- 
vard University, has made the world his debtor. 
Those poor remains of mortality of which we 
have heard so much, have been of more ser- 
vice to the human race than the souls once 
within them ever dreamed of conferring. Doc- 
tor Bigelow's repeated and searching investiga- 
tions into the anatomy of the hip joint showed 
him the band which formed the chief difficulty 
in reducing dislocations of the thigh. What 
Sir Astley Cooper and all the surgeons after 
him had failed to see, Doctor Bigelow detected. 
New rules for reduction of the dislocation were 
the consequence, and the terrible pulleys disap- 
peared from the operating amphitheatre. 

" Still more remarkable are the results obtained 
by Doctor Bigelow in the saving of life and the 



260 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

lessening of suffering in the new method of op- 
eration for calculus. By the testimony of those 
renowned surgeons, Sir Henry Thompson and 
Mr. Erichsen, by the award to Doctor Bigelow 
of a sexennial prize founded by the Marquis d' 
Argenteuil, and by general consent, this in- 
novation is established as one of the great 
modern improvements in surgery. I saw the 
numerous and patient experiments by which 
that priceless improvement was effected, and I 
cannot stop to moan over a scrap of integument, 
said to have been made imperishable, when I 
remember that for every lifeless body which 
served for these experiments, a hundred died 
or a thousand living fellow creatures have been 
saved from unutterable anguish, and many of 
them from premature death. 

" You will visit the noble hall soon to be filled 
with the collections left by the late Professor 
John Collins Warren, added to by other contri- 
butors, and to the care and increase of which 
the late Doctor John Jackson of precious memory 
gave many years of his always useful and 
laborious life. You may expect to find there 
a perfect Golgotha of skulls and a platoon of 
skeletons open to the sight of all comers. You 



THE HARVABD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 261 

will find portions of every human organ. You 
will see bones softened by acid and tied in 
bowknots ; other bones burned until they are 
light as cork and whiter than ivory, yet still 
keeping their form ; you will see sets of teeth 
from the stage of infancy to that of old age, 
and in every intermediate condition, exquisitely 
prepared and mounted ; you will see preparations 
that once formed portions of living beings now 
carefully preserved to show their vessels and 
nerves ; the organ of hearing exquisitely carved 
by French artists ; you will find specimens of 
human integument, showing its constituent parts 
in different races ; among the rest, that of the 
Ethiopian, with its cuticle or false skin turned 
back to show that God gave him a true skin 
beneath it as white as our own. Some of these 
specimens are injected to show their blood 
vessels ; some are preserved in alcohol ; some 
are dried. There was formerly a small scrap, 
said to be human skin, which had been subjected 
to the tanning process, and which was not the 
least interesting of the series. I have not seen 
it for a good while, and it may have disappeared 
as the cases might happen to be open while 
unscrupulous strangers were strolling through 



262 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

the museum. If it has, the curator will probably 
ask the next poor fellow who has his leg cut 
off, for permission to have a portion of its integ- 
ument turned into leather. He would not 
object, in all probability, especially if he were 
promised that a wallet for his pocket or a slip- 
per for his remaining foot, should be made 
from it. 

" There is no use in quarrelling with the 
specimens in a museum because so many of 
them once formed a part of human beings. The 
British Government paid fifteen thousand pounds 
for the collection made by John Hunter, which 
is full of such relics. The Huntarian Museum 
is still a source of pride to every educated citi- 
zen in London. Our foreign visitors have 
already learned that the Warren Anatomical 
Museum is one of the sights worth seeing during 
their stay among us. Charles Dickens was 
greatly interested in looking through its treasures, 
and that intelligent and indefatigable hard 
worker, the Emperor of Brazil, inspected its 
wonders with as much curiosity as if he had 
been a professor of anatomy. May it ever re- 
main sacred from harm in the noble hall of 
which it is about taking possession. If vio- 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 263 

lence, excited by false outcries, shall ever 
assail the treasure-house of anthropology, we 
may tremble lest its next victim shall be the 
home of art, and ignorant passions once aroused, 
the archives that hold the wealth of literature 
perish in a new Alexandrian conflagration. 
This is not a novel source of apprehension to 
the thoughtful. Education, religious, moral, in- 
tellectual, is the only safeguard against so fearful 
a future. 

" To one of the great interests of society, the 
education of those who are to be the guardians 
of its health, the stately edifice which opens 
its doors to us for the first time to-day is 
devoted. It is a lasting record of the spirit 
and confidence of the young men of the med- 
ical profession, who led their elders in the 
brave enterprise, an enduring proof of the 
liberality of the citizens of Boston and of friends 
beyond our narrow boundaries, a monument to 
the memory of those who, a hundred years 
ago, added a school of medicine to our hon- 
ored, cherished, revered university, and to all 
who have helped to sustain its usefulness and 
dignity through the century just completed. 

" It stands solid and four square among the 



264 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

structures which are the pride of our New 
England Venice — our beautiful metropolis, won 
by well-directed toil from the marshes and 
creeks and lagoons which were our inheritance 
from nature. The magnificent churches around 
it let in the sunshine through windows stained 
with the pictured legends of antiquity. The 
student of nature is content with the white 
rays that show her just as she is ; and if ever 
a building was full of light — light from the 
north and the south ; light from the east and 
the west ; light from above, which the great 
concave mirror of sky pours down into it — 
this is such an edifice. The halls where Art 
teaches its lessons and those where the sister 
Sciences store their collections, the galleries 
that display the treasures of painting, and sculp- 
ture, are close enough for agreeable companion- 
ship. It is probable that in due time the 
Public Library, with its vast accumulations, will 
be next door neighbor to the new domicile of 
our old and venerated institution. And over 
all this region rise the tall landmarks which 
tell the dwellers in our streets and the trav- 
eller as he approaches that in the home of 
Science, Arts, and Letters, the God of our 



THE HABVABB MEDICAL SCHOOL. 265 

Fathers is never forgotten, but that high above 
these shrines of earthly knowledge and beauty, 
are lifted the towers and spires which are the 
symbols of human aspiration ever looking up 
to Him, the Eternal, Immortal, Invisible." 

At the conclusion of this noble address, the 
portrait of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes 
was presented to the Medical School by Doctor 
Minot, in the happily-chosen words that follow : 

" Many alumni of the school, together with 
some of its present students, have desired that 
a permanent memorial of their beloved teacher, 
Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, should be 
placed in the new college building, in token of 
their gratitude for the great services which he 
has rendered to many generations of his pupils. 
By his eminent scientific attainments, his sound 
method of teaching, his felicity of illustration, 
and his untiring devotion to all the duties of 
his chair, he inspired those who were so for- 
tunate as to come under his instruction with 
the importance of a thorough knowledge of 
anatomy, the foundation of medical science. 
In the name of the alumni and students of 
this college, I have the pleasure of presenting 
to the medical faculty a portrait of Professor 



266 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Holmes, painted by Mr. Alexander, to be placed 
in the college in remembrance of his invaluable 
services to Harvard University, to the medical 
profession and to the community." 

The bust of Professor Bigelow was then 
presented to the school by Hon. Samuel Green, 
in the following words : 

"The pleasant duty has been assigned me, 
Mr. President, to present to you, as the head 
of the corporation of Harvard College, in behalf 
of his many friends, this animated bust of 
Professor Henry J. Bigelow. The list of sub- 
scribers comprises about fifty names, and 
includes nearly all the surgeons of the two 
great hospitals in this city ; several gentlemen 
not belonging to the medical profession, but 
warm personal friends of Doctor Bigelow ; a 
few ladies who had been his patients ; and 
all the surgical house pupils who had ever been 
connected with the Massachusetts General 
Hospital during his long term of service at that 
institution, so far as they could easily be reached 
by personal application. The bust is given on 
the condition that it shall be placed permanently 
in the new surgical lecture room, which corre- 
sponds to the scene of Doctor Bigelow's long 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 267 

labors in the old building. It has been made 
by the eminent sculptor, Launt Thompson of 
New York, and is a most faithful representa- 
tion of the distinguished surgeon. It outlines 
with such accuracy and precision the features 
of his face and the pose of his head that nothing 
is wanted, in the opinion of his friends, to 
make it a correct likeness. 

" I need not, in the presence of this audi- 
ence, name the various steps by which Doctor 
Bigelow has reached the high position which is 
conceded to him as freely and fully in Europe 
as it is in America ; but I cannot forbear an 
allusion to some of his original researches. His 
mechanism of the reduction of a dislocated 
femur by manipulation was a great discovery 
in surgical science, and follows as a simple 
corollary to the anatomical facts which he has 
so clearly and minutely demonstrated. His 
operation of rapid lithotrity has deprived a 
painful disease of much of its terror as well as 
of its danger. Nor should I overlook on this 
occasion his quick and ready discernment of 
the importance of Doctor Morton's demon- 
stration of the use of ether as a safe anaesthetic, 
which took place at the Massachusetts General 



268 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Hospital in the autumn of 1846. The discovery 
of this greatest boon to the human family, 
since the invention of printing, was fraught 
with such immense possibilities that the 
world was slow to realize its magnitude ; but 
by the clear foresight and prudent zeal of 
Doctor Bigelow, shown in many ways, the day 
was hastened when its use became well nigh 
universal. 

" Doctor Bigelow has filled the chair of surgery 
in this medical school during thirty-three years, 
a period of professional instruction that rarely 
falls to the lot of any teacher ; and he now 
leaves it with the honored title of professor 
emeritus. During this long term of service 
he has taught, through his lectures, probably 
not fewer than one thousand eight hundred stu- 
dents, who have graduated at the Harvard 
Medical School, and perhaps seven thousand five 
hundred more who have taken their degrees else- 
where ; and by these thousands of physicians 
now scattered throughout the land, those of 
them who survive, Doctor Bigelow is remem- 
bered as most eminently a practical teacher. 
Active in his profession, clear in his instruction, 
and enthusiastic in his investigations, he always 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 269 

had the happy faculty of imparting to his 
students' a kindred spirit and zeal. Hand 
inexpert us loquor." 

The remainder of the exercises took place 
in the new building. The dedicatory prayer 
was offered by Rev. Doctor Peabody, who con- 
secrated the building " to science, humanity and 
charity, to Christian tenderness and love, and 
to all the ministries that can enrich humanity." 

President Eliot then said : 

"In behalf of the President and Fellows of 
Harvard University, and of the Medical School, 
I declare this building to be devoted to med- 
ical science and the art of healing." 

Professor Henry W. Williams, in behalf of 
the medical faculty, said : 

" Friends of the Harvard Medical School : 
For a hundred years the medical faculty of 
Harvard College have earnestly sought to dis- 
cover, and striven faithfully to teach, whatever 
might exalt the condition, relieve the woes and 
prolong the service of those minds and bodies 
through which man lives, and moves, and is. 
Year by year they have seen their horizon of 
knowledge extended and their sphere of duty 
enlarged. But, though zeal and self-sacrifice 



270 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

have not been wanting, their efforts to be use- 
ful have been continually hindered because of 
imperfect facilities and scanty resources. All 
is changed. In this more wonderful than Alad- 
din's palace, risen from the sea,* and which 
has already endured the wrath and mercy of 
the flames, we see a fulfilment of our hopes, 
and the means and assurance of success. 
Thanks to generous benefactors, there will no 
longer be a lack of room or of appliances for 
our needs ; our work will go on under fairer 
auspices, and we can offer to disciples of the 
healing art fitter opportunities and ampler aid 
in their studies. 

"As spokesman of the faculty on this occasion, 
so full of felicitation and of promise, I would 
I could give to their message a host of tongues, 
to adequately thank those whose great flood of 
bounty has thus favored and endowed us. In 
occupying this beautiful and convenient struc- 
ture, we shall ever feel that the place is dig- 
nified by the givers' deed. And we rejoice 
the more, because we know that this gift of 
three hundred thousand dollars has been bestowed 
by those who are accustomed to use their own 

•The site occupied by the medical college was once covered by the tides. 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 271 

eyes in their estimation of desert, and that it 
signifies a hearty approval of our endeavors, 
and an intent that medical science, as it is to 
be here embodied and taught, shall have a 
warm and generous support. 

"In accepting this more than princely gift as 
a token that the value and necessity of well- 
educated physicians to every community is felt 
and acknowledged, we hail the privilege of 
goodly fellowship in which the donors and our- 
selves have become co-workers, to the end that 
blessings to the whole land may arise and be 
memorized in this institution ; and we trust 
that the efforts of the faculty to advance the 
knowledge, train the judgment and perfect the 
skill of those entering our profession will ever 
continue to deserve countenance and help. 

Colonel Henry Lee's address was the next to 
follow : 

Mr. President : Thanks for your invitation 
to be present on this interesting occasion — 
the hundredth anniversary of your medical 
school and the dedication of a new building 
of fair proportions, well adapted to your wants, 
as far ^ ?. non-professional can judge. You 
have assigned to me the honorable task of 



272 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

speaking for the contributors to the building 
fund. I little thought, as I used to gaze with 
awe at that prim, solitary, impenetrable little 
building in Mason Street, and with imaginative 
companions conjure up the mysteries within, 
that I should ever dare to enter and explore 
its interior; nor have I yet acquired that relish 
for morbid specimens which characterized my 
lamented kinsman, who devoted so many years 
to accumulating and illustrating your patholog- 
ical collection. It is an ordeal to a layman, 
Mr. President, especially to one who has reached 
the sixth age, to be so forcibly reminded, as 
one is here, of the 

last scene of all 
That ends this strange, eventful history, 
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything, 

and it is a further ordeal to assume to speak 
for others, whose motives for aiding you I 
may not adequately set forth. This I can 
say, that wc are citizens of no mean city ; 
that private frugality and public liberality have 
distinguished the inhabitants of this 'Old 
Town of Boston,' from the days of the good 
and wise John YVinthrop, whose own sub- 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 273 

stance was consumed in founding this colony, 
to the present time. Down through these two 
centuries and a half the multiform and ever- 
increasing needs of the community have been 
discovered and supplied, not by Government, 
but by patriotic citizens, who have given of 
their time and substance to promote the com- 
mon weal, remembering ' that the body is not 
one member, but many, and that the members 
should have the same care, one for another.' 
It is this public spirit, manifested in its heroic 
form in our civil war, that has made this 
dear old Commonwealth what we all know it 
to be, despite foul slanders. Far distant be 
the day when this sense of brotherhood shall 
be lost. Purple and fine linen are well, if one 
can afford them ; but let not Dives forget 
Lazarus at his gate. 

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. 

"Whatever doubts may arise as to some of 
our benevolent schemes, our safety and prog- 
ress rest upon the advancement of sound 
learning, and we feel assured that the increased 
facilities furnished by this ample building for 



274 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

acquiring and disseminating knowledge of our 
fearful and wonderful frame, will be improved 
by your brethren. Some of the papers read 
before the International Medical College, in 
London, two years ago, impressed me deeply 
with the many wants of the profession. And 
who are more likely to have their wants sup- 
plied ? for the physician is not regarded here, 
as in some countries, as the successor to the 
barber surgeon, and his fees slipped into his 
upturned palm as if he were a mendicant or a 
menial. Dining with two Englishmen, one an 
Oxford professor, the other the brother of a 
lord, a few years since, I was surprised to 
hear their views of the social standing of the 
medical profession, and could not help con- 
trasting their position here, where, if not all 
autocrats, they are all constitutional, and some 
of them hereditary, monarchs, accompanied by 
honor, love, obedience, troops of friends. But 
however ranked, physicians have the same at- 
tributes the world over. I have had occasion 
to see a good deal of English, French, Ger- 
man and Italian physicians under very trying 
circumstances, and have been touched by their 
affectionate devotion to their patients. The 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, 275 

jpod physician is our earliest and our latest 
friend ; he listens to our first and our last 
breath ; in all times of bodily distress and 
danger we look up to him to relieve us. 
' Neither the pestilence that walketh in dark- 
ness, nor the sickness that destroyeth in the 
noonday, deters him.' 

Alike to him is time, or tide, 
December's snow or July's pride ; 
Alike to him is tide, or time, 
Moonless midnight, or matin prime. 

" The faithful pursuit of any profession in- 
volves sacrifice of self ; but the man who calls 
no hour his own, who consecrates his days 
and nights to suffering humanity, treads close 
in the footsteps of his Master. No wonder, 
then, that the bond between them and their 
patients is so strong ; no wonder that we 
respond cheerfully to their call, in gratitude 
for what they have, and in sorrow for what 
they have not, been able to do to preserve 
the lives and to promote the health of those 
dear to us. And how could money be spent 
more economically than to promote the further 
enlightenment of the medical profession ? What 



276 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

better legacy can we leave our children, and 
our children's children, than an illumined 
medical faculty ? " 

After these addresses a reception was given 
to the subscribers to the building fund by 
President Eliot and the faculty of the Medi- 
cal School. 

In referring to Doctor Holmes' brave, out- 
spoken words, an eminent Boston clergyman 
wrote as follows : 

" The only qualification which we have heard 
of the universal and enthusiastic appreciation 
of the sage, the vivacious and the rich utter- 
ance of our admired doctor and foremost man 
of letters on this occasion, was in a somewhat 
regretful feeling that he should have turned 
the full power of his humor and of his caustic 
satire upon the mean and contemptible effort 
of an unprincipled demagogue to defame the 
Harvard Medical School. We do not sympa- 
thize with even this qualified stricture on the 
remarks of Doctor Holmes here referred to. 
True, his address was an historical one, designed 
for an historical review of the past of the 
institution. But it is also to serve the uses of 
history for the future, especially as a record 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 211 

of the aspects of the institution and of the 
interest and confidence of our living commu- 
nity in it during the year marking such a 
conspicuous event for it as the inauguration of 
the new edifice prepared for it by the munifi- 
cence of those who appreciate its almost divine 
offices of mercy and benevolence. And during 
this very year, an assault of the most dastardly 
character has been made upon it by one who, 
high in office and with vast power of influence 
over an ignorant and easily prejudiced constit- 
uency, knows as well as any one among us 
the utter and wicked falsity of his allegations. 
" Doctor Holmes was forced to make some 
recognition of these slanders addressed to the 
uninformed, credulous and gullible portion of 
our community. He would have been generally 
censured if he had passed them by. The only 
question for him and for a critically judging 
community would concern the true spirit and 
way in which he should recognize them. We 
can conceive of no more fitting and effective 
course than that which the sagacious doctor 
followed. The occasion was one in which it 
was for him, in defining and greeting the steady 
advance made during a century in medical and 



278 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

surgical science among us, to remind his hearers 
that those to whom we are indebted for this 
advancement, have had, with their own noble, 
personal devotion and effort, to triumph over 
and fight their way against all the prejudices 
and obstructions which popular ignorance, preju- 
dice and superstition have engaged to annoy 
and withstand them. In scarcely any one 
of the multiplied interests of average society 
have popular weaknesses and follies more mis- 
chievously asserted themselves than in opposi- 
tion to hospitals and medical schools. When 
that noble institution, the Massachusetts Gen- 
eral Hospital, was devised, about three quar- 
ters of a century ago, the most besotted folly 
and suspicion were engaged against those who 
planned and fostered it. It was charged that 
under the guise of benevolent service for home- 
less sufferers and for the victims of accident 
or special maladies, it was really to be artfully 
used for the trial of new medicines and risky 
experiments on the poor and humble, that 
practitioners might have the benefit of the 
knowledge thus gained in dealing with their 
rich patients. Let any one visit the wards of 
that institution to-day, or read its annual reports, 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 279 

noting the thousands of cases of its work of 
mercy in restoration or relief of all classes 
of sufferers, and then recall the asinine abuse 
visited upon its projectors. The millions of 
money which have been poured into its treas- 
ury, mostly from the private benevolence of 
our own citizens, is the crown of glory for 
that institution. An appeal of the most artful 
and atrocious sort to this same popular ignor- 
ance and passion has been made this year for 
purposes which we need not search the dic- 
tionary to characterize with fitting epithets. 
How could Doctor Holmes on this great occa- 
sion pass it by ? How could he have treated 
the offence and the offender with a more fit- 
ting combination of wit and scorn ? Most 
happy also was his suggestive allusion to the 
self mastery by which practitioners at the 
dissecting table have to control, in the interest 
of their high service, revulsions and shrinkings 
incident to disgusting offices unknown even to 
chambermaids and stable boys. 

" But as Doctor Holmes well said, there 
are more attractive and instructive matters to 
engage our most grateful interest in the oc- 
casion to which he gave such a grand inter- 



280 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

pretation. The century of medical history which 
he sketched with such a nai've and vigorous 
narrative has its most suggestive incidents 
lettered on the walls on the main stairway of 
the imposing edifice just opened for use. 
Little Holden Hall in Cambridge ; the obscure 
structure on Mason street ; the melancholy 
building on Grove street, with its tragic history, 
in which the donor of its site was turned to 
a use by no means serviceable to science, 
make up the genealogical, architectural ancestry 
of the new hall. The development in the 
material fabric is no inadequate symbol of the 
progress in every quality, accomplishment and 
attainment characteristic of the advance of the 
profession in the last hundred years." 

The name of Doctor Holmes will always be 
so intimately connected with the Harvard 
Medical School that we give below a brief 
sketch of its past history. 

In the year 1780, the Boston Medical Society 
voted " that Doctor John Warren be desired 
to demonstrate a course of anatomical lectures 
the ensuing winter. " The course of lectures 
proved so popular that the corporation of the 
college asked Doctor Warren to draw up a 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 281 

plan for a Medical School in connection with 
Harvard" College. At the commencement of 
the school, October 7th, 1783, there were three 
professors : Doctor John Warren, who lectured 
on anatomy and surgery ; Doctor Aaron Dex- 
ter, who took the department of chemistry and 
materia medica ; and Doctor Benjamin Water- 
house, instructor in the theory and practice 
of medicine. During the first year of its 
establishment the attendance was rather small, 
consisting of members of the senior class of 
the college and those students who could pro- 
cure the consent of their parents. The name 
of the first graduate recorded was that of John 
Fleet, in 1788, and he seems to have been 
the only graduate of that class. 

In 1806, Doctor John Collins Warren, son 
of Doctor John Warren, was appointed assist- 
ant professor of anatomy and surgery. He 
proved a most enthusiastic laborer in behalf of 
the school and to it he gave his large anatom- 
ical collection, which was considered the most 
complete in the country. In his will he be- 
queathed his body to the interest of science, 
and provided that his skeleton be prepared and 
mounted, to serve the uses of the demonstra- 



282 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

tors on anatomy. It was he, also, who took 
the first steps that led to the establishment of 
the Medical School in Boston. At 49 Marl- 
borough street, he opened a room for the demon- 
stration of practical anatomy, and here a course 
of lectures was started in the autumn of 18 10 
by Doctors Warren, Jackson, and Waterhouse. 
In 1816, the " Massachusetts Medical College" 
was formally inaugurated in a building erected 
on Mason street by a special grant from the 
Commonwealth. At this time the faculty con- 
sisted of Doctors Jackson, Warren, Gorham, 

Jacob Bigelow and Walter Channing. 

■ 
In 1 82 1 the Massachusetts General Hospital 

on Allan street, was established ; the two insti- 
tutions have since been intimately connected as 
the resources afforded students by the Hospital 
are here given to members of the Medical School. 

In 1836, Doctor Jackson resigned his posi- 
tion, and Doctor John Ware, the assistant 
professor of theory and practice was appointed 
in the chair. Eleven years later Doctor John 
Collins Warren resigned, having served the in- 
terests of the school for forty-one years. 

In 1847, through the liberality of Doctor 
George C. Shattuck, Sr., a professorship of patho- 



THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL. 283 

logical anatomy was established, and Doctor 
John Barnard Swett Jackson was appointed to 
fill the chair. It was during this year that 
Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes was chosen 
Parkman professor of anatomy and physiology. 
In 1849 Doctor Henry J. Bigelow was ap- 
pointed to the chair of surgery left vacant by 
the resignation of Doctor George Hayward, and 
in 1854, Doctor Walter Channing was succeeded 
by Doctor David Humphreys Storer. In 1855 
Doctor Jacob Bigelow resigned, and was suc- 
ceeded by Doctor Edward Hammond Clarke. 

The building on North Grove street, erected 
by a grant of the State upon land donated by 
Doctor George Parkman, was first occupied by 
the school in 1846. In this building, which 
was considered amply commodious at that 
time, were stored the Warren Anatomical 
Museum, the physiological library founded by 
George Woodbury Swett, the gifts to the 
chemical department by Doctor John Bacon, 
and the collection of microscopes given by 
Doctor Ellis. Since then the number of med- 
ical students has constantly increased and the 
accommodations becoming inadequate, steps were 
taken for the erection of the new building. 



284 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM, 



SAID one of the medical students in Doctor 
Holmes' last class at Harvard : 

" We always welcomed Professor Holmes with 
enthusiastic cheers when he came into the 
class room, and his lectures were so brimful of 
witty anecdotes that we sometimes forgot it 
was a lesson in anatomy we had come to 
learn. But the instruction — deep, sound and 
thorough — was there all the same, and we 
never left the room without feeling what a 
fund of knowledge and what a clear insight 
upon difficult points in medical science had been 
imparted to us through the sparkling medium!" 

The position of Parkman Professor of Ana- 
tomy in Harvard University, was resigned by 
Doctor Holmes in the autumn of 1882, that he 
might give his time more exclusively to literary pur- 
suits. He was immediately appointed Professor 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 285 

Emeritus by the college, and Doctor Thomas 
Dwight, * a teacher in the Medical School, suc- 
ceeded him in the active duties of the chair. 

The last lecture of Doctor Holmes before 
his students, was delivered in the anatomical 
room, on the twenty-eighth of November. As 
he entered the room, a storm of applause 
greeted him, and then as it died away, one 
of 'the students came forward and presented 
him, in behalf of his last class, with an ex- 
quisite "Loving Cup." On one side of this 
beautiful souvenir was the happy quotation 
from his own writings : " Love bless thee, joy 
crown three, God speed thy career." 

Doctor Holmes was so deeply affected by 
this delicate token of esteem that, afterwards, 
in acknowledging the cup by letter, he said 
that the tribute was so unexpected it made 
him speechless. He was quite sure, however, 
that they did not mistake aphasia for acardia — 
his heart was in its right place, though his 
tongue forgot its office. 

In the address to his .class, the Professor 
gave an interesting review of his thirty-five 
years' connection with the school. Then he 
referred to his early college days, and to his 



286 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

studies in Paris, and added many delightful 
reminiscences of the famous French savans 
whose lectures he attended at that time. A 
full report of this address may be found in 
the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, for 
December 7, 1882. 

This, one of his most interesting essays, is 
also reprinted in one of Doctor Holmes' later 
volumes, entitled Medical Essays. 

On the evening of April 12, 1883, a com- 
plimentary dinner was given Doctor Holmes 
at Delmonico's, by the medical profession of 
New York City. The reception opened at about 
half-past six, and soon after that hour Doctor 
Holmes entered the rooms with Doctor Fordyce 
Barker. The guests, numbering some two hun- 
dred and twenty-five in all, were seated at six 
tables, the table of honor occupying the upper 
end of the room, and decorated with banks of 
choice flowers. 

The menus were cleverly arranged in the 
form of small books bound in various-colored 
plush. A dainty design in gilt, representing 
a scalpel and pen, surrounded by a laurel 
wreath, adorned the covers, and inside was the 
stanza : 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 287 

A few can touch the magic string, 
' And noisy fame is proud to win them, 
Alas, for those that never sing, 

But die with all their music in them. 

At the top of the leaf containing the bill of 
fare were the lines : 

You know your own degree ; sit down ; at first and last 
a hearty welcome. 

at the end : 

Prithee, no more ; thou dost talk nothing to me. 

A few minutes before the coffee was brought 
in, each guest received what purported to be a 
telegram from Boston, dated April i, 1883. 
The message read as follows : 

The dinner bell, the dinner bell 

Is ringing loud and clear, 
Through hill and plain, through street and lane 
It echoes far and near. 

I hear the voice ! I go, I go ! 

Prepare your meat and wine ; 

They little heed their future need 

Who pay not when they dine. 

—O. W. H. 

The back of the despatch was decorated with 



288 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

two pictures ; one showing Doctor Fordyce 
Barker ringing a dinner bell and brandishing a 
knife and fork, the other Doctor Holmes 
hurrying to answer the bell, with a pile of 
books under one arm and a bundle of bones 
under the other. 

Among the guests present were George Wil- 
liam Curtis, Hon. William M. Evarts, Bishop 
Clark, Whitelaw Reid, Doctors Post, Emmett, 
Sayre, Billing, Vanderpoel Metcalfe, Detmoold 
Draper, Doremus, Hammond, St. J. Roosa, 
Flint, Dana, Peabody. Ranney, Jacobi, Austin, 
and many others. 

The first toast was as follows : 

The hour's now come ; 
The very minute bids thee ope thine ear 
Obey, and be attentive. 

— The Tempest. 

After a few brief words of introduction, Doc- 
tor Barker called upon Doctor A. H. Smith 
to complete the greeting, which he did in the 
following happy lines : 

You've heard of the deacon's one hoss shay 
Which, finished in Boston the self-same day 
That the Citv of Lisbon went to pot, 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 289 

Did a century's service, and then was not. 

But the record's at fault which says that it burst 

Into simply a heap of amorphous dust, 

For after the wreck of that wonderful tub 

Out of the ruins they saved a hub; 

And the hub has since stood for Boston town, 

Hub of the universe, note that down. 

But an orderly hub as all will own, 

Must have something central to turn upon, 

And, rubber-cushioned, and true and bright 

We have the axle here to-night. 

Thrice welcome then to our festal board 

The doctor-poet, so doubly stored 

With science as well as with native wit, 

Poeta nascitur, you know, non fit, 

Skilled to dissect with knife or pen 

His subjects dead or living men ; 

With thought sublime on every page 

To swell the veins with virtuous rage, 

Or with a syringe to inject them 

With sublimate to disinfect them ; 

To show with demonstrator's art 

The complex chambers of the heart, 

Or armed with a diviner skill 

To make it pulsate at his will ; 

With generous verse to celebrate 

The loaves and fishes of some giver \ 

And then proceed to demonstrate 

The lobes and fissures of the liver; 

To soothe the pulses of the brain 

With poetry's enchanting strain, 

Or to describe to class uproarious 



290 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Pes hippocai?ipi accessorious ; 
To nerve with fervor of appeal 
The sluggish muscles into steel, 
Or, pulling their attachments, show 
Whence they arise and where they go; 
To fire the eye by wit consummate, 
Or draw the aqueous humor from it ; 
In times of peril give the tone 
To public feeling, called backbone, 
Or to discuss that question solemn, 
The muscles of the spinal column. 
And now I close my artless ditty 
As per agreement with committee, 
And making place for those more able 
I leave the subject on the table. 

The toast " Our Guest," was prefaced by 
the following quotation from Emerson ; 

" One would say here is a man with such 
an abundance of thought ! He is never dull, 
never insincere, and has the genius to make 
the reader care for all that he cares for." 

As Doctor Holmes rose, the room fairly 
shook with applause. Without any prefatory 
remarks, he then read the following poem : 

Have I deserved your kindness ? Nay, my friends ; 
While the fair banquet its illusion lends, 
Let me believe it, though the blood may rush 
And to my cheek recall the maiden blush 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 291 

That o'er it flamed with momentary blaze 

When first I heard the honeyed words of praise; 

Let me believe it while the roses wear 

Their bloom unwithering in the heated air; 

Too soon, too soon their glowing leaves must fall, 

The laughing echoes leave the silent hall, 

Joy drop his garland, turn his empty cup, 

And weary labor take his burden up, — 

How weigh that burden they can tell alone 

Whose dial marks no moment as their own. 

Am I your creditor ? Too well I know 
How Friendship pays the debt it does not owe, 
Shapes a poor semblance fondly to its mind, 
Adds all the virtues that it fails to find, 
Adorns with graces to its heart's content, 
Borrows from love what nature never lent, 
Till what with halo, jewels, gilding, paint, 
The veriest sinner deems himself a saint. 
Thus while you pay these honors as my due, 
I owe my value's larger part to you; 
And in the tribute of the hour I see 
Not what I am, but what I ought to be. 

Friends of the Muse, to you of right belong 
The first staid footsteps of my square-toed song; 
Full well I know the strong heroic line 
Has lost its fashion since I made it mine ; 
But there are tricks old singers will not learn, 
And this grave measure still must serve my turn, 
So the old bird resumes the self-same note 
His first young summer wakened in his throat; 



292 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

The self-same tune the old canary sings, 

And all unchanged the bobolink's carol rings ; 

When the tired songsters of the day are still, 

The thrush repeats his long-remembered trill ; 

Age alters not the crow's persistent caw, 

The Yankee's " Haow," the stammering Briton's " H; 

And so the hand that takes the lyre for you 

Plays the old tune on strings that once were new, 

Nor let the rhymester of the hour deride 

The straight-backed measure with its stately stride ; 

It gave the mighty voice of Dnden scope; 

It sheathed the steel-bright epigrams of Pope ; 

In Goldsmith's verse it learned a sweeter strain, 

Byron and Campbell wore its clanking chain ; 

I smile to listen while the critic's scorn 

Flouts the proud purple kings have nobly worn ; 

Bid each new rhymer try his dainty skill 

And mould his frozen phrases as he will ; 

We thank the artist for his neat device — 

The shape is pleasing though the stuff is ice. 



Fashions will change — the new costume allures — 
Unfading still the better type endures ; 
While the slashed doublet of the cavalier 
Gave the old knight the pomp of chanticleer, 
Our last-hatched dandy with his glass and stick 
Recalls the semblance of a new-born chick 
( To match the model he is aiming at 
He ought to wear an eggshell for a hat ), 
Which of these objects would a painter choose, 
And which Velasquez or Vandyke refuse ? 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 293 

When your kind summons reached my calm retreat, 

Who are the friends, I questioned, I shall meet? 

Some in young manhood, shivering with desire 

To feel the genial warmth of Fortune's fire — 

Each with his bellows ready in his hand 

To puff the flame just waiting to be fanned ; 

Some heads half-silvered, some with snow-white hair ; 

A crown ungarnished glistening here and there, 

The mimic moonlight gleaming on the scalps 

As evening's empress lights the shining Alps. 

But count the crowds that throng your festal scenes — 

How few that knew the century in its teens ! 

Save for the lingering handful fate befriends, 
Life's busy day the Sabbath decade ends; 
When that is over, how with what remains 
Of Nature's outfit — muscle, nerve and brains? 

Were this a pulpit, I should doubtless preach; 
Were this a platform, I should gravely teach; 
But to no solemn duties I pretend 
In my vocation at the table's end, 
So as my answer let me tell instead 
What Landlord Porter — rest his soul — once said. 
A feast it was that none might scorn to share ; 
Cambridge and Concord demigods were there — 
And who were they ? You know as well as I 
The stars long glittering in our Eastern sky — 
The names that blazon our provincial scroll 
Ring round the world with Britain's drumbeat roll ! 

Good was the dinner, better was the talk ; 

Some whispered, devious was the homeward walk ; 



^94 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

The story came from some reporting spy — 
They lie, those fellows — Oh, how they do lie ! 
Not ours those foot tracks in the new-fallen snow — 
Poets and sages never zigzagged so ! 

Now Landlord Porter, grave, concise, severe, 

Master, nay, monarch, in his proper sphere, 

Though to belles-lettres he pretended not, 

Lived close to Harvard, so knew what was what; 

And having bards, philosophers and such 

To eat his dinner, put the finest touch 

His art could teach, those learned mouths to fill 

With the best proofs of gustatory skill ; 

And finding wisdom plenty at his board, 

Wit, science, learning, all his guests had stored, 

By way of contrast, ventured to produce, 

To please their palates, an inviting goose. 

Better it were the company should starve 

Than hands unskilled that goose attempt to carve ; 

None but the master artist shall assail 

The bird that turns the mightiest surgeon pale. 

One voice arises from the banquet hall, — 
The landlord answers to the pleading call ; 
Of stature tall, sublime of port he stands, 
His blade and trident gleaming in his hands; 
Beneath his glance the strong-knit joints relax 
As the weak knees before the headsman's axe. 

And Landlord Porter lifts his glittering knife 
As some stout warrior armed for bloody strife ; 
All eyes are on him; some in whispers ask — 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 295 

What man is he who dares this dangerous task ? 
When, lo ! the triumph of consummate art, 
With scarce a touch the creature drops apart ! 
As when the baby in his nurse's lap 
Spills on the carpet a dissected map. 

Then the calm sage, the monarch of the lyre, 
Critics and men of science all admire, 
And one whose wisdom I will not impeach, 
Lively, not churlish, somewhat free of speech, 
Speaks thus : " Say, master, what of worth is left 
In birds like this, of breast and legs bereft ? " 

And Landlord Porter, with uplifted eyes, 

Smiles on the simple querist, and replies — 

" When from a goose you've taken legs and breast, 

Wipe lips, thank God, and leave the poor the rest ! " 

Kind friends, sweet friends, I hold it hardly fair 

With that same bird your minstrel to compare, 

Yet in a certain likeness we agree — 

No wrong to him, and no offence to me ; 

I take him for the moral he has lent, 

My partner — to a limited extent. 

When the stern landlord, whom we all obey, 
Has carved from life its seventh great slice away, 
Is the poor fragment left in blank collapse 
A pauper remnant of unvalued scraps ? 
I care not much what Solomon has said, 
Before his time to nobler pleasures dead; 
Poor man! he needed half a hundred lives 
With such a babbling wilderness of wives! 



296 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

But is there nothing that may well employ 
Life's winter months — no sunny hour of joy? 
While o'er the fields the howling tempests rage, 
The prisoned linnet warbles in his cage ; 
When chill November through the forest blows, 
The greenhouse shelters the untroubled rose, 
Round the high trellis creeping tendrils twine, 
And the ripe clusters fill with blameless wine, 
We make the vine forget the winter's cold, 
But how shall age forget it's growing old ? 

Though doing right is better than deceit, 

Time is a trickster it is fair to cheat; 

The honest watches ticking in your fobs 

Tell every minute how the rascal robs. 

To clip his forelock and his scythe to hide, 

To lay his hour-glass gently on its side, 

To slip the cards he marked upon the shelf, 

And deal him others you have marked yourself, 

If not a virtue, cannot be a sin, 

For the old rogue is sure at last to win. 

What does he leave when life is well-nigh spent 
To lap its evening in a calm content ? 
Art, Letters, Science, these at least befriend 
Our day's brief remnant to its peaceful end — 
Peaceful for him who shows the setting sun 
A record worthy of his Lord's " well done ! " 

When he, the Master whom I will not name, 
Known to our calling, not unknown to fame, 
At life's extremest verge half-conscious lay, 
Helpless and sightless, dying day by day, 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 297 

His brain, so long with varied wisdom fraught, 

Filled with the broken enginery of thought, 

A flitting vision often would illume 

His darkened world and cheer its deepening gloom, — 

A sunbeam struggling through the long eclipse, — 

And smiles of pleasure play around his lips. 

He loved the Art that shapes the dome and spire ; 

The Roman's page, the ring of Byron's lyre, 

And oft, when fitful memory would return 

To find some fragment in her broken urn, 

Would wake to life some long-forgotten hour, 

And lead his thought to Pisa's terraced tower, 

Or trace in light before his rayless eye 

The dome-crowned Pantheon printed on the sky; 

Then while the view his ravished soul absorbs 

And lends a glitter to the sightless orbs, 

The patient watcher feels the stillness stirred 

By the faint murmur of some classic word, 

Or the long roll of Harold's lofty rhyme, 

u Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime," — 

Such were the dreams that soothed his couch of pain, 

The sweet nepenthe of the worn-out brain. 

Brothers in art, who live for others' needs 
In duty's bondage, mercy's gracious deeds, 
Of all who toil beneath the circling sun 
Whose evening rest than yours more fairly won ? 
Though many a cloud your struggling morn obscures, 
What sunset brings a brighter sky than yours ? 

I, who your labors for a while have shared, 

New tasks have sought, with new companions fared, 

For Nature's servant far too often seen 



298 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

A loiterer by the waves of Hippocrene ; 

Yet round the earlier friendship twines the new ; 

My footsteps wander, but my heart is true, 

Nor e'er forgets the living or the dead 

Who trod with me the paths where science led. 

How can I tell you, O my loving friends, 

What light, what warmth, your joyous welcome lends 

To life's late hour ? Alas ! my song is sung, 

Its fading accents falter on my tongue. 

Sweet friends, if shrinking in the banquet's blaze, 

Your blushing guest must face the breath of praise, 

Speak not too well of one who scarce will know 

Himself transfigured in its roseate glow; 

Say kindly of him what is — chiefly — true, 

Remembering always he belongs to you ; 

Deal with him as a truant, if you will, 

But claim him, keep him, call him brother still ! 

The next toast was to " The Clergy." 

He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one, exceeding 

wise, fair-spoken and persuading. 

— King Henry VIII. 

Bishop Clark of Rhode Island responded. 
" We honor," he said, " the high priesthood of 
science and art. We honor the man who has 
brought life and joy to many weary dwellings, 
and therefore we extend the right hand of fellow- 
ship to him." When after tracing the lineage of 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 299 

the guest, he reviewed his life, quoted from his 
writings, and said in conclusion, that he stood 
side by side with Oliver Goldsmith. 
The toast to "The Bar" — 

Why might that not be the skull 

Of a lawyer? Where be his quidet's now? 

— Hamlet. 

was answered by Hon. Wm. M. Evarts, in a 
witty and characteristic address. 

Doctor T. Gaillard Thomas responded to the 
toast, " The Medical Profession " — 

She honors herself in honoring a favorite son, — 

and George William Curtis followed in an 
address, answering to the toast " Literature " — 

A kind of medicine in itself. 

— Measure for Measure. 

All factions, he declared, claimed Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, and all peoples spoke of 
him in praise. He then mentioned many of 
the poet's songs, reciting a stanza occasionally 
and commenting on them in a touching man- 
ner. The next toast was "The Press" — 



300 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

But words are things, and a small drop of ink 

Falling like dew upon a thought, produces 

That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. 

— Byron. 

This was responded to by Whitelaw Reid in 
a humorous address in which he closely con- 
nected Doctor Holmes with the profession of 
journalism. It was a late hour when the com- 
pany separated, and the last toast given, found 
a hearty, though silent response from all pres- 
ent — 

Good-night, good-night ! Parting is such sweet sorrow, 
That I shall say good-night till it be to-morrow. 

— Romeo and yuliet. 



Before closing this long chapter of "honors 
to Doctor Holmes," we cannot refrain from giv- 
ing the following cordial tribute from John 
Boyle O'Reilly: 

"Oliver Wendell Holmes: — the wise, the 
witty, the many ideakl, philosopher, poet, physi- 
cian, novelist, essayist, professor, but, best of all, 
the kind, the warm heart. A man of unex- 
pected tastes, ranging in all directions from 
song to science, and from theology to boat- 



TOKENS OF ESTEEM. 301 

racing. He met one day on Tremont street 
an acquaintance fond of athletic exercise, and 
he stopped himself with a pathetic little sigh. 

" ' Ah, you send me back fifty years,' he said. 
' As you walked then with a swing, you reminded 
me of an old friend who was dead before you 
were born ; and he was a good man with 
his hands, too.' 

" Never was a more healthy, natural, lovable 
man than Doctor Holmes." 



302 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER XX. 



IN LATER YEARS. 



IT was not until the spring of 1886 that 
Doctor Holmes made his second trip to 
Europe. A whole half century had elapsed since 
his return home from the three years spent 
abroad when he was completing his medical 
studies. 

In this second European tour he was accom- 
panied by his daughter, Mrs. Sargent ; and he 
gives his own delightful account of it in " One 
Hundred Days in Europe," which first appeared 
as a serial in the Atlantic Monthly, and has 
since been published in book form, with a 
charming dedication to his daughter. "The 
Sailing of the Autocrat " was celebrated by 
T. B. Aldrich in a fine poem, from which we 
quote a few lines as embodying the tender love 
and ardent admiration of the whole American 
people : — 



IN LATER YEARS. 303 

" O Wind and Wave, be kind to him ! 
For him may radiant mornings break 
From out the bosom of the deep, 
And golden noons above him bend, 
And fortunate constellations keep 
Bright vigils to his journey's end ! 

Take him, green Erin, to thy breast ! 
Keep him, gray London — for a while ! 
In him we send thee of our best, 
Our wisest word, our blithest smile — 
Our epigram, alert and pat, 
That kills with joy the folly hit — 
Our Yankee Tzar, our Autocrat 
Of all the happy realms of wit ! 
Take him and keep him — but forbear 
To keep him more than half a year . . . 
His presence will be sunshine there, 
His absence will be shadow here!" 

We delight to recall with what distinguished 
honors he was received abroad from the highest 
dignitaries of church and state, as well as from 
his own literary compeers. It was during this 
visit in England that the London Spectator wrote, 
" No literary American — unless it be Mr. Lowell, 
and we should not except even him — occupies 
precisely the same place as Doctor Holmes in 
Englishmen's regard. They have the feeling for 
him which they had for Charles Lamb, Charles 



304 OLIVER WEXDELL HOLMES. 

Dickens, and John Leech, in which admiration 
somewhat blends into and is indistinguishable 
from affectionateness." 

The Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and 
Cambridge all conferred their honorary degrees 
upon him, and he has given us his own inimitable 
description of the manner in which he was enter- 
tained by Carlyle and by Tennyson. 

At a club dinner given to him in London, he 
said to the bishop of Gloucester : 

" I think we are all unconsciously conscious of 
each other's brain waves at times. The fact is 
that words and even signs are a very poor sort of 
language, compared with the direct telegraphy be- 
tween souls. The mistake we make is to suppose 
that the soul is circumscribed and imprisoned by 
the body. Now, the truth is, I believe I extend a 
good way outside my body. Well, I should say at 
least three or four feet all round, and so do you, 
and it is our extensions that meet. Before words 
pass or we shake hands, our souls have exchanged 
impressions, and they never lie." 

In reply to a toast at the farewell banquet 
given him in Liverpool by the Medical Society 
of London, he said : 

"I cannot do justice to the manner in which 



IN LATER TEARS. 305 

I have been everywhere received. Any phrase of 
mine would be a most inadequate return for the 
months of loving and assiduous attentions through 
which I have been living. You need not ask me, 
therefore, the almost stereotyped question, how 
I like England and Scotland. I cannot help lov- 
ing both, and I only regret I could not accept the 
welcome awaiting me from my friends in warm- 
hearted Ireland." 

Fresh in mind still is the enthusiastic ovation 
given to our beloved Autocrat when the hundred 
days had passed, and "Wind and Wave" brought 
safely home again " our wisest word, our blithest 
smile." 

But grim Death, that had " rained through every 
roof save his," was soon to send a cruel shaft into 
the poet's happy home. On the 6th of February, 
1888, the dear companion and helpmeet of his life 
for nearly half a century — 

" Stole with soft step the shining archway through 
And left the past years' dwelling for the new." 

Mrs. Holmes was a remarkably gifted woman, 
and singularly fitted to be the wife of a man of 
genius. She was devoted to her home and family, 
and the charm of her sweet womanliness will lonp- 

o 



306 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

be remembered by those who had the privilege 
of knowing her intimately. Doctor Holmes has 
himself told us that her simple, reticent " I think 
so," was valued by him as a far more encouraging 
sanction for action, than the dogmatic advice of 
a more arbitrary adviser. When the Civil War 
broke out, Mrs. Holmes was one of the first 
Boston women to enter actively into the work 
of the United States Sanitary Commission. 

" She impressed us all," says one of her fellow- 
workers, " as being so strong, steady, clear, and 
firm. There was not one among the whole body 
with whom we were so united as with her. And 
the strange thing about her was that she really 
had the executive ability and the clear mind, as 
well as the gentle and amiable spirit. She shirked 
no labor, even of the most menial, and was one 
of those who gave up almost all her time to the 
work. Her eldest son was at this time in the 
war, and went through six battles ; and this, 
although she never complained, was a constantly 
harrowing pain to her." 

The younger son of Doctor Holmes, Edward 
Jackson Holmes, died in 1884, leaving one son 
who bears the same name; and in 1889, his only 
daughter, Mrs. Sargent, passed away. The ach- 



IN LATER YEARS. 307 

ing void left in heart and home by these sad 
bereavements was felt still more keenly as, one 
after another, the old friends of his youth were 
laid to rest. 

" I do not think," he said upon one of his last 
birthdays, "that one of the companions of my 
early years, of my boyhood, is left. When a man 
reaches my age, and then looks back fifty years, 
why, even that distance into the past to such a 
man leaves a pretty good gap behind it. Half 
a century from eighty years leaves a ' gap ' of 
thirty years, and thirty years are a good many to 
most men." 

At one of the ( Saturday Club dinners, when 
fewer members than usual were present, Doctor 
Holmes remarked, 

" This room is full of ghosts to me. I can see 
so many faces here that used to be here years 
ago, and that have since passed from this life. 
They are all real to me here, and I think if I were 
the only living person at one of these dinners, 
I could sit here and talk to those I see about me, 
and dine pleasantly, even alone." 

Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier and 
Lowell — all lifelong friends of Holmes — had 
already "passed on," To other dearly-loved com- 



308 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

rades, also, the great last summons had come. 
Ticknor, Prescott, Fields, Benjamin Pierce, James 
Freeman Clarke, Francis Parkman — all were 
gone. 

"I feel," he often said with a sigh, "that I am 
living in another age and generation." 

Little, indeed, did the young Oliver realize 
when he wrote that pathetic poem, " The 
Last Leaf," that he was the one of our five 
great poets destined to be the "last upon the 
tree!" 

Upon his eightieth birthday, he remarked, " I 
have worn well, but you cannot cheat old age. 
The difficulty with me now in writing is that I 
don't like to start on anything. I always feel 
that people must be saying, 'Are you not rash 
at eighty years of age to write for young people 
who think a man old at forty ? ' ' 

But in his delightful series of papers, " Over 
the Teacups," we mark the same brilliant flashes 
of wit, the same keen intuition, the same warm- 
hearted sympathy with all phases of human na- 
ture, that our beloved Autocrat showed in the 
Breakfast Table chats. As Doctor Holmes him- 
self says : 

" In sketching the characters. I have tried to 



IN LATER YEARS. 309 

make just the difference one would naturally 
find in a breakfast and a tea table set." 

Another volume of poems, " Before the Cur- 
few," and a series of essays entitled " Our New 
Portfolio," were published soon after. The last 
poem of Doctor Holmes printed in the Atlantic 
Monthly was written in his eighty-fourth year 
and dedicated to the memory of Francis Park- 
man. Some of its verses, however, pay a loving 
tribute also to his old friends Prescott and 
Motley : 

"One wrought the record of a royal pair 
Who saw the great discoverer's sail unfurled, 
Happy his more than regal prize to share, 
The spoils, the wonders of the sunset world. 

There, too, he found his theme ; upreared anew 
Our eyes beheld the vanished Aztec shrines, 
And all the silver splendors of Peru 
That lured the conqueror to her fatal mines. 

Nor less remembered he who told the tale 
Of empire wrested from the strangling sea ; 
Of Leyden's woe, that turned his readers pale, 
The price of unborn freedom yet to be ; 

Who taught the new world what the old could teach; 
Whose silent hero, peerless as our own, 
By deeds that mocked the feeble breath of speech 
Called up to life a State without a throne. 



310 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

As year by year his tapestry unrolled, 
What varied wealth its growing length displayed ! 
What long processions flamed in cloth of gold ! 
What stately forms their glowing robes arrayed! " 

Contrasting with Prescott's and Motley's the 
subject of Parkman's histories, the poet says, 

"Not such the scenes our later craftsman drew, 
Not such the shapes his darker pattern held; 
A .deeper shadow lent its sombre hue, 
A sadder tale his tragic task compelled. 

He told the red man's story ; far and wide 

He searched the unwritten records of his race; 

He sat a listener at the sachem's side, 

He tracked the hunter through his wildwood chase. 



Soon o'er the horizon rose the cloud of strife, 
Two proud, strong nations battling for the prize; 
Which swarming host should mould a nation's life, 
Which royal banner flout the western skies. 

Long raged the conflict; on the crimson sod 
Native and alien joined their hosts in vain; 
The lilies withered where the lion trod, 
Till peace lay panting on the ravaged plain." 

In the extracts given from this fine poem, with 
its stately, majestic rhythm, it is plain to see that, 
even at the age of eighty-four, our autocrat poet 
had lost none of the vigor and fire of youth. 



IN LATER YEARS. 311 

In the closing verses he speaks most tenderly 
of Parkman's patient, untiring energy, 

"While through long years his burdening cross he bore," 

and concludes with this fine eulogy : 

"A brave, bright memory! his the stainless shield 
No shame defaces and no envy mars ! 
When our far future's record is unsealed 
His name will shine among its morning stars." 

It was in January, 1889, that Doctor Holmes 
sent to Doctor Richard M. Hodges, who was at 
that time president of the Boston Medical Library 
Association, the following characteristic letter : 

My Dear Sir: 

I have transferred my medical library to the 
hall of the Boston Medical Library Association. 
Please accept it as a gift from its late president. 
As there is no provision for its reception, and 
as I liked the idea of keeping together the books 
which had been so long together, I have provided 
a new set of shelves in which they can be prop- 
erly and conveniently arranged. 

Your very truly, 

O. W. Holmes. 



312 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

To show how highly Doctor Holmes valued this 
library, which consisted of nine hundred and sixty- 
eight extremely rare volumes, Doctor Chadwick, 
the librarian, said : "All these books have been 
collected by him in his fifty years of experience, 
and it is fitting that we should realize it is the 
result of years of labor. He has been ready on 
every occasion to deliver addresses on topics hav- 
ing a wide scope. He carried off with honor 
three of the four Boylston prizes, and this alone 
shows the range of his studies. He has contrib- 
uted to the funds of the association in various 
ways, and now gives us his most valuable library. 
In this act, as well as his continuing the position 
as president of the association several years after 
he had relinquished all other connection with the 
profession, he has designated our institution as 
the one in which he takes the greatest pride ; in 
whose future he has the greatest confidence." 
In reply, Doctor Holmes then said : 
" The books I have offered the association, 
and which you have kindly accepted, constitute 
my own medical library, with the exception of a 
few volumes which, for several reasons, I have 
retained. It has grown by a slow process of 
accretion. The first volume of it was ' Bell's 



IN LATER TEARS. 313 

Anatomy,' and the last was ' Elements of Phar- 
macy.' The oldest book was written in 1490, 
and the latest in 1887, so it can be seen that the 
library covers the space of four centuries." 

After reviewing the better books of the li- 
brary, and alluding to the private library that a 
practitioner should keep, Doctor Holmes added : 
" These books are dear to me ; a twig from some 
one of my nerves runs to every one of them, and 
they mark the progress of my study and the step- 
ping-stones of my professional life. If any of 
them can be to others as they have been to me, 
I am willing to part with them, even if they are 
such old and beloved companions." 

Doctor Holmes' warm interest in everything 
connected with education was shown most em- 
phatically in one of the last public addresses he 
delivered. It was at that memorable reception 
given at the Vendome, February 28, 1893, by the 
Boston publishers to Doctor Holmes and other 
authors, and to the members of the National 
Educational Association. Mrs. Elizabeth Phelps- 
Ward, with Mr. Henry O. Houghton and Mr. 
Edwin Ginn, gave welcome to the many distin- 
guished guests. 

When Doctor Holmes was called upon to ad- 
dress the large company assembled, he began : 



314 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

" Surely the Autocrat never felt more powerless 
than he does at this moment. I meant to come 
here and say a few almost careless words. I was 
saying to myself, * You know very well what you've 
got to talk about, and you can soon say it.' But," 
and here the Autocrat's bright face grew serious, 
" at half-past ten this morning there came to me 
an elegantly engraved copper-plate invitation to 
appear here, with a formality and a style about it 
which showed that I had deceived myself in think- 
ing I could utter a few careless words. There 
was but one refuge for me, and that was the old 
one. I can only hold up a copy of verses," and 
he waved the manuscript deprecatingly. 

" But not one word, not one thought of it was 
in my head before half-past ten to-day. There 
are things in literature," and here Dr. Holmes 
dropped his voice to a confidential key, " that are 
christened ' impromptus,' the authenticity of which 
I am inclined to doubt. I have the idea that a 
good many impromptus have cost their authors 
many sleepless nights. 

M I shall tell you what I would have spoken 
about. I should have said, in the first place, that 
I have a great sympathy with instructors. I have 
been an instructor myself. I was for thirty-five 



IN LATER YEARS. 315 

years professor in Harvard College, and two 
years before that professor in Dartmouth College. 
I enjoyed very much the relations I had with my 
students in both places. Many of them have 
lasted up to the present time, and it is pleasant 
for me every now and then to have a bald-headed 
man come up to me and tell me he was one of my 
boys thirty or forty years ago. 

"A great many changes have taken place since 
that time, but two of them are especially interest- 
ing. One is the sub-division of teaching. There 
were six of us who taught the medical graduates 
of Harvard College during a considerable part of 
the time when I was professor there. There are 
now seventy. How much better they are taught 
I do not know. I presume they are taught well. 
But a wicked thought came into my head just 
now — it is not every animal that has the most 
legs who crawls the fastest. It reminds me of 
the sirloin of beef one day, which was mince-meat 
on the second." 

All these pleasantries were given in the 
Autocrat's happiest manner, amidst many inter- 
ruptions of laughter and applause from his 
audience. 

"I don't mean, however," he added, "to dep- 



316 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

recate that which I accomplished by the sub- 
division into specialties. What I say is rather 
playful than serious. The next point is the edu- 
cation of women, which I have regarded at a dis- 
tance, to be sure. But, occasionally visiting 
Wellesley and the Cambridge Annex, it has been 
a great delight to me to see how the intellects of 
the fair sex matched with those of the sterner. I 
then thought I should say something of the im- 
portance of implanting ideas on all the most 
important subjects at a very early period of life, 
and I was going to recall my theology which 
came out of the little primer, and my patriotism 
which was kindled at the shrine of Dr. Dwight's 
' Columbia, Queen of the World.' But all these 
things I would prefer to leave, and what else I 
would have said I will defer until the next occa- 
sion. I also wish to say here, personally, that it 
was most unwillingly that I appeared before an 
audience like this. I felt it was, at my age, more 
becoming that I should be a listener rather than a 
speaker." Here he was interrupted by cries of 
" No ! No! " but he shook his head determinedly, 
saying, " I am speaking seriously now, however 
difficult it may be to do that. These little verses 
I have written, and which I am going to read, are 



IN LATER TEARS. 317 

really impromptu. They are poorly scrawled, for 
my hand was unsteady." 

Then in a clear, strong voice he read : 

"Teachers of teachers! yours the task, 
Noblest that noble minds can ask, 
High up Aonia's murmurous mount 
To watch, to guard the sacred fount 
That feeds the stream below. 
To guide the hurrying flood that fills 
A thousand silvery, rippling rills 
In ever widening flow. 

Rich is the harvest from the fields 

That bounteous nature kindly yields; 

But fairer growths enrich the soil 

Ploughed deep by thought and wearied toil, 

In learning's broad domain. 

And where the leaves, the flowers, the fruits, 

Without your watering at the roots 

To fill each branching vein? 

Welcome ! the author's firmest friends, 
Your voice the surest Godspeed lends. 
Of you the growing mind demands 
The patient care, the guiding hands 
Through all the mists of morn. 
And knowing well the future's need, 
Your prescient wisdom sows the seed 
To flower in years unborn." 



318 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

It will be remembered that the last time Doctor 
Holmes appeared in public to read a poem was on 
May 28, 1893, when he attended the celebration 
of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reorganiza- 
tion of the Boston Young Men's Christian Union. 
The beautiful hymn he wrote for this occasion is 
the sweet, simple expression of his own lifelong 
creed : 

" Our Father ! while our hearts unlearn 
The creeds that wrong thy name, 
Still let our hallowed altars burn 
With faith's undying flame. 

Not by the lightning's gleam of wrath 

Our souls thy face shall see, 
The star of love must light the path 

That leads to heaven and thee. 

Help us to read our Master's will 

Through every darkening stain 
That clouds his sacred image still, 

And see him once again, 

The brother man, the pitying friend 

Who weeps for human woes, 
Whose pleading words of pardon blend 

With cries of raging foes. 

If, 'mid the gathering storms of doubt 
Our hearts grow faint and cold, 



IN LATER YEARS. 319 

The strength we cannot live without, 
' Thy love will not withhold. 

Our prayers accept; our sins forgive; 

Our youthful zeal renew; 
Shape for us holier lives to live, 

And nobler work to do ! " 



320 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 



CHAPTER XXI. 



LAST DAYS. 



THE eighty-fifth birthday of Doctor Holmes 
was quietly spent at his pleasant country 
home in Beverly. 

" The burden of years sits lightly upon me," 
he remarked to a friend that day, " but after 
fourscore years the encroachments of time make 
themselves felt with rapidly increasing progress. 
The twelfth septennial period has always seemed 
to me as one of the natural boundaries of life. 
One who has lived to complete his eighty-fourth 
year has had his full share, even of an old man's 
allowance. Whatever is granted over that is a 
prodigal indulgence of nature. When one can 
no longer hear the lark, when he can no longer 
recognize the faces he passes on the street, when 
he has to watch his steps, when it becomes more 
and more difficult for him to recall names, he is 
reminded at every moment that he must spare 



LAST DAYS. 321 

himself, or nature will not spare him the penalties 
she exacts for overtaxing his declining powers." 

In spite of these words, that seem prophetic to 
us now, the sunny-hearted Autocrat declared he 
was "eighty-five years young" that day, and all the 
friends who came with loving gifts and congratu- 
lations fully agreed with him. His conversation 
sparkled with all the wit of his younger days, 
and he talked with animation of his daily walks 
through the town, and of his long drives into the 
country in search of " big trees." Near the base 
of "Woodbury's Hill" in Beverly, he had re- 
cently found a mammoth elm that he considered 
finer than all his other favorites in Essex county ; 
for, in addition to its great size, the wide spread- 
ing branches were covered with unusually thick 
rich foliage. 

" I call all trees mine," said the Autocrat, " that 
I have put my wedding-ring on — that is, my 
thirty-foot tape-measure ! " 

Having been slightly troubled with writers' 
cramp, Doctor Holmes was advised by one of his 
callers that day to try a typewriter. This remark 
brought forth a smile from the man who had 
moved the people of the world with his pen ; and 
he said, with a merry laugh, that he did not pro- 



322 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

pose to forsake an old friend for a new one at that 
late time in life. 

In speaking of his birthday, Doctor Holmes 
alluded to the great men who were born that 
same year, 1809. 

" Yes," he said, " I was particularly fortunate 
in being born the same year with four of the most 
distinguished men of the age, and I really feel 
flattered that it so happened. Now, in England, 
there were Tennyson, Darwin, and Gladstone — 
Gladstone being, I think, four months younger 
than myself. That is a most remarkable trio, 
isn't it? Just contemplate the greatness of those 
three men, and then remember that in the same 
year Abraham Lincoln was born in this country. 
Most remarkable !" And when the visitor added, 
" You have forgotten to mention the fifth, doc- 
tor ; there was also Oliver Wendell Holmes," 
Doctor Holmes quickly retorted in his own inim- 
itable way : 

" Oh ! that does not count ; I ' sneaked in,' as 
it were ! " 

Doctor Holmes remained at his country home 
in Beverly until late in September, this last year 
of his life, and his health seemed steadily to im- 
prove with the bracing autumn weather. 



LAST DATS. 323 

On his return to the city, however, he had a 
severe attack of the asthmatic trouble from which 
he had suffered all his life. A severe cold, and 
the "weight of years" aggravated what seemed 
at first but a slight indisposition ; and the poet, 
with his accurate medical knowledge, realized that 
the end was not far distant. 

But as he grew weaker and weaker, his sun- 
shiny spirit shone all the brighter. With playful 
jests he tried to soothe the sad hearts of his dear 
ones, and to make them feel that the pain of part- 
ing was the only sting of death. He seldom, 
indeed, made any reference to the dark shadow he 
felt so near; but one morning, three or four days 
before his death, he said to his son : 

"Well, Wendell, what is it? King's Chapel?" 

" Oh, yes, father," said Judge Holmes. 

" Then I am satisfied. That is all I am going 
to say about it." 

On Sunday morning, October 7th, he seemed 
so much easier that his physician and intimate 
friend, Doctor Charles P. Putnam, went out of 
town to make a professional visit, leaving his 
brother, Doctor James Putnam, in charge. 

About noon Doctor Holmes had a sudden 
spasm, and his breathing became so labored 



324 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

that he asked to be moved into his favorite 
armchair. 

" That is better, thank you. That rests me 
more," he said to his son, who stood beside him. 

These were his last words. Painlessly and 
peacefully, with all the dear ones of his home 
around him, his life flowed away like the ebbing 
of a tide. 

To the world outside, the tidings of Doctor 
Holmes' death, that bright October day, came 
with a terrible shock. As late as Thursday of 
the preceding week he had been down town, and 
was intending to be present at the meeting of 
the Saturday Morning Club. Not even his near- 
est friends realized that the end was so near. 

"It is as if a long accustomed element had gone 
out of the air ! " exclaimed one Boston citizen. 
"While Doctor Holmes lived we felt as if we 
were still bound by a living tie to the Titanic age 
of American literature." 

"The death of Doctor Holmes," said Charles 
Eliot Norton, "marks the close of an epoch in 
American literature. He was the sole survivor of 
the five great New England authors, and he has 
no successor. This group was a remarkable one. 
They grew up, as it were, together, and are the 



LAST DAYS. 325 

product of our New England life in the first half 
century. Their writings were contemporaneous, 
and they were bound in the closest ties of friend- 
ship. Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, 
Holmes — no other section of the country can 
show such a group." 

" Boston without Doctor Holmes ! " exclaimed 
another friend. " What will it be like ? There 
has been but one 'Autocrat/ — there will never be 
another ! " 

Yet not only Boston — the whole world mourned 
the departure of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Within 
his domain his genius was imperial, and his bright 
cheery nature endeared him to all humanity. 

It seemed fitting that Nature herself should 
weep on the sad burial day of one whose life had 
embodied her sunshine ! 

The wind mourned, the rain fell continuously, 
as loving hands bore into King's Chapel, upon 
Wednesday, October 10, all that was mortal of 
our famous poet. The simple funeral rites began 
just at noon. The casket, upon which rested 
wreaths of pansies and laurels, was borne up the 
aisle to the wailing organ strains of Handel's 
" Dead March in Saul." Rev. Edward Everett 
Hale led the sad procession, reciting in his clear, 



326 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

sympathetic voice, " I am the resurrection and 
the life, saith the Lord ; he that believeth in me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live." 

All the seats upon the middle aisle were re- 
served and occupied by the poet's immediate 
family and intimate friends, members of the 
Massachusetts Medical Society, representatives of 
Harvard College, and delegations from the numer- 
ous other societies of which the poet and physician 
was a member. 

A beautiful wreath of laurel hung from the 
south gallery, marking with mute eloquence the 
vacant pew of the dead poet. 

The Chapel was filled with a notable assembly, 
representing the best life of Boston — its intellect, 
culture, and heart. And probably never at one 
time had the ancient church held so many venera- 
ble personages. Rev. S. F. Smith, the author of 
" America," and Rev. Samuel May of Leicester, 
the only surviving classmates of Doctor Holmes, 
were present, in spite of the inclement weather. 
Judge Rockwood Hoar, fast nearing the fourscore 
milestone, Doctor Bartol, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe 
— all the great poet's friends and contemporaries 
were there to pay their last tribute. 

After the reading of passages from the Bible, 



LAST DATS. 327 

and a prayer by Rev. Edward Everett Hale, a 
selection from Mendelssohn's "Elijah," "Oh, rest 
in the Lord," was sung by Miss Lena Little, fol- 
lowed by a chant, " The Lord is my Shepherd," 
and a hymn, "O Paradise," by the choir. 

Then the strains of the "Dead March" again 
rolled from the organ, and the funeral procession 
left the Chapel. 

The services at the grave were attended by only 
the relatives and most intimate friends. It was 
the wish of Doctor Holmes and his family that 
he should rest beside his wife in the Jackson lot 
at Mt. Auburn. It is in the immediate vicinity 
of the Holmes' lot, amidst the beautiful oaks 
that the poet loved ; and only a few yards distant 
rest Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. 

The life of Oliver Wendell Holmes spanned 
nearly the whole nineteenth century ; and to the 
very last he kept abreast of the feeling, the 
thought, the movement, of the day. He was one 
of the few men of our generation who raised the 
American name in the esteem of the whole world. 

Comparing Doctor Holmes with his four illus- 
trious contemporaries in literature, Professor 
Norton says : — 



328 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

" Emerson was the deepest thinker of them 
all ; Longfellow possessed in a rare degree the 
power of felicitous expression, and gave us 
thoughts couched in the most beautiful poetry ; 
Whittier was the apostle of freedom, fearless, 
and moved by an untiring purpose ; Lowell 
was a man of versatile genius, as great in the 
field of poetry as he was in that of prose. 

" Holmes was one who wrote without effort. 
His was a ready genius. His thoughts came 
unbidden, and he had but to give them expres- 
sion in words. Apt, vivacious, animated, pure, 
happy, he always was at once a wit and a 
humorist, but greater in his wit than in his 
humor. Whatever his subject, he wrote of it 
with equal ability, and his books are remark- 
able for the variety of topics which he has 
treated so easily." 

Of all his poems, Doctor Holmes ranked 
"The Chambered Nautilus" highest. 

"I wrote that poem," he said, "at white 
heat. When it was finished I took it to my 
wife, who was sewing in an adjoining room, 
and said, ' I think I have the best poem here 
that I have ever written.' And I have never 
changed my mind about it." 



LAST DATS. 329 

By universal consent, indeed, " The Cham- 
bered Nautilus" is considered the gem of Doc- 
tor Holmes' beautiful lyrics. The poet always 
kept in his study specimens of the nautilus 
shell, cut entirely across, to show the spiral 
ascent of its curious inhabitant. He delighted 
to show these shells to his visitors ; and, as he 
replaced them on the shelves, he would often 
repeat the last stanza of his beautiful poem : — 

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll ; 

Leave thy low-vaulted past; 

Let each new temple, loftier than the last, 

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 

Leaving thine out-grown shell by life's unresting sea. 

Among the poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes 
are seven that may truly be called " Hymns ; " 
and it is well to remember that the test of 
the use and value of a hymn is not the occa- 
sion for which it was written, but its adop- 
tion into hymnal collections, and its use there- 
after. 

"We were singing one of Doctor Holmes' 
hymns in our church," said Rev. Minot Savage, 



330 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

" that Sunday morning when the great singer was 
passing into the higher choir. 

" Doctor Holmes was manly in his religion, and 
his songs show the bright and noble spirit that 
dominated his life. He was worshipful and trust- 
ful, and always hopeful. He was a firm, even 
passionate, believer in an existence after death, 
and found the ground of his trust in the dissect- 
ing-room. As a scientist he faced everything, 
and then believed that the soul was more than 
the body. " 

Of these seven hymns of Doctor Holmes', the 
familiar one beginning, — 

Lord of all being, throned afar, 
Thy glory flames from star to star, 

the poet appropriately characterized his " Sun- 
day Hymn." It first appeared in the Atlantic 
Monthly of December, 1859, aR d the " Professor" 
prefaced it with these words : — 

" Peace be to all such as may have been vexed 
by any utterance the pages have repeated. They 
will doubtless forget for the moment the differ- 
ence in the lines of truth we look at through our 
human prisms, and join in singing (inwardly) 
this hymn to the Source of the Light we all need 



LAST DATS. 33i 

to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make 
us all brothers." 

In the many heartfelt tributes to Doctor Holmes, 
it is interesting to note that his spiritual character 
was appreciated and approved by men differing 
from him very widely in religious belief. Indeed, 
it would be impossible for any one to hold com- 
munion with him through his writings without 
growing more kindly, more loving toward his fel- 
low-men, and more reverent, more filial, towards 
his Heavenly Father. 

" And personally," remarked an intimate friend, 
" Doctor Holmes was as delightful a character as 
he is in his books. His best thoughts came full 
flood, as it were, from a richly stocked mind. His 
most characteristic traits were his extreme kindli- 
ness and his animation. The mirth and vivacity 
which bubble forth from his books was the same 
which came spontaneously from his lips in con- 
versation. He was a delightful companion, and 
a true friend to those who were so fortunate as 
to know him and be known by him." 

Oliver Wendell Holmes taught that life is good 
and sweet, and worth the living. There is not in 
all his writings a single morbid note. The world 
is brighter and happier and better for the rare 
sift of such a life. 



332 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

His wit has been the solvent of bigotry. He 
has done for the religious thought of the century 
what Whittier did for the political; and his bright 
optimism has pierced many an old-time error with 
the potency of the sunbeam. 

""It is clearly seen in the perspective," says 
Charles Dudley Warner, "that Doctor Holmes' 
life gives us the kind of reputation that is of value 
to one's native land, and shows us that, after all 
the parade of official station and the notoriety of 
politics and money, those names only endure in 
honor and love which are borne by men of high 
intellectual and moral qualities. When we sum 
up all our sources and achievements, it is to him 
and his few compeers that we must point for our 
distinction." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



Poetical Illustrations of th Athenaeum Gallery of 
Paintings. Boston: True & Osgood. 1827. 

This book contains short poems by John Osborne Sargent and Park Benjamin, 
besides those attributed to Doctor Holmes. 

The Harbinger. A May Gift, dedicated to the ladies who have 

so kindly aided the New England Institution for the Blind. 

Boston : Carter, Hendee & Co 1833. 

John Osborne Sargent was also a contributor to this book. 
Poems. Boston : Otis, Broaders & Co. 1836. 
Boylston Prize Dissertations, for the years 1836 and 1837. 

Boston : Charles C. Little and James Brown 1838. 

The subjects of these dissertations are as follows : The first is on " Indigenous 
Intermittent Fever in New England;" the second on " Neuralgia ;" and the 
third on " Direct Exploration." They are all dedicated to Pierre Chas. 
Alex. Louis, Doctor of Medicine of the faculties of Paris and St. Petersburg. 

Marshall Hall's Principles of the Theory and Practice 
of Medicine. First American edition, revised anc enlarged by 
Jacob Bigelow and O. W. Holmes. Boston : 1839. 

HOMGEOPATHY AND ITS KlNDRED DELUSIONS. Two lectures 

delivered before the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful 
Knowledge. Boston: William D. Ticknor. 1842. 
The Position and Prospects of the Medical Student An 
address delivered before the Boylston Medical Society of Har- 
vard University, January 12, 1844. Boston: John Putnam, 
Printer. 1844. 

Urania: A Rhymed Lesson. Delivered before the Mercantile 
Library Association. Boston : 1846. 

Report of the Committee on Medical Literature. Pub- 
lished in transactions of the American Medical Association, 
Vol. I. 1847. 

Introductory Lecture. Delivered at the Massachusetts Medi- 
cal College, November 3, 1847. Boston: William D. Ticknor 
& Co. 1847. 

Astr^ea: Thi Balance of Illusions. Boston: Ticknor, 
Reed & Fields. 1850. 

This Poem wa delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, 
August 14, 185 c 

333 



334 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



The Benefactors of the Medical School of Harvard 
University. With i biographical sketch of the late Doctor 
George Parkman. Boston : Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1850. 
Delivered as an Introductory Lecture at the Mass. Med. College, Nov. 7, 1850. 

The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever. 

This lecture was read before the Boston Society for Medical Improvement 
in 1843, and reprinted from the New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine and 
Surgery in 1855. 

Oration. Delivered before the New England Society in New 
York City, at their Semi-Centennial Anniversary, December 22, 
1855. New York : Wm. C. Bryant & Co. 

This oration may also be found in the Society's Report of the Semi-Centennial 
Celebration, New York, 1856. 

Tn. Autocrai of the Breakfast-Table. Every man his 
own Bosweh Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 1858. 

Valedictory Address to the Medical Graduates of Harvard 
University, March 10, 1858. Boston; David Clapp, 184 Wash- 
ington st. 1858. 

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Boston : Ticknor 
& Fields. 1859. 

Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science. 
An address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, 
at the annual meeting, May 30, i860. Boston: Ticknor & 
Fields, i860 

Vive la France ! A Poem read bv Doctor Holmes at the dinner 
given to H. I. H. the Prince Napoleon, September 25, 1861. 
Cambridge 

This was privately printed, together with an address of Edward Everett's, de- 
livered at the same time. 

Elsie Venner : A Romance of Destiny. Boston: Ticknor 

& Fields. 1 86 1. 
Songs in Many Keys. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 1861. 
Border Links of Knowledge in some Provinces of Medical 

Science. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 1862. 

An introductory lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard Col- 
lege, in which the Work of Chemistry and the Microscope in medicine and physi- 
ology is practically shown. 

Soundings from the Atlantic. Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 
1863. 

Teaching from the Chair and at the Bedside. An Intro- 
ductory Lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard 
University, Nov. 6, 1867. Boston : David Clapp & Son, 1867. 
The Guardian Angel. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1867. 

Atlantic Almanac for 1868. Boston : Ticknor & Fields 
Office of the Atlantic Monthly. 1868. 
Donald G. Mitchell was a joint editor of this annual, but The Seasons, and 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 335 



Talk concerning the Human Body and its Management, are from the pen of 
Doctor Holmes. 

The Medical Profession in Massachusetts. A Lecture read 
at the Lowell Institute, January 29, 1869. 

Valedictory Address delivered to the Graduating Class of the 
Bellevue Hospital College, March 2, 1871. New York: 1871. 

Mechanism in thought and Morals. An address delivered 
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 
29, 1870, with Notes and Afterthoughts. Boston : James R. 
Osgood & Co. 1 87 1. 

The Claims of Dentistry. An address delivered at the Com- 
mencement Exercises of the Dental Department in Harvard 
University, February 14, 1872. Boston : Printed by Rand, 
Avery & Co. 1872 

The Poet at the Breakfast-Table. Boston : James R. 
Osgood & Co. 1873. 

Professor Jeffrtes Wyman. A Memorial Outline reprinted 

from the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1874. Boston and 

Cambridge. 
Songs of many Seasons. 1862-74. Boston : James R. Osgood 

& Co. 1874. 
Address. Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Boston 

Microscopical Society. Cambridge : The Riverside Press. 

1877. 

This address was reprinted from the Boston Medical and Surgical journal, 
May 24, 1877. 

The Schoolboy. Illustrated Boston : Houghton, Osgood & 
Co. 1878. 

John Lothrop Motley. A Memoir Boston : Houghton, 
Osgood & Co. 1878 

The Tro Gate and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co. 1880 

Address. Delivered at the dedication of the Hall of the Boston 
Medical Library Association, 19 Bovlston place, on December 3, 
1878 Cambridge: The Riverside Press. 1881. 

Address on Emerson. Published in the Massachusetts Histori- 
cal Society's " Tribute to Longfellow and Emerson." Boston : 
A. Williams & Co. 1882. 
It should also be mentioned here that Doctor Holmes is the Annotator of 

Edward Stafford's Medical Directions, written for Governor Winthrop in 1643. 

This book was published in Boston in 1862. 

He is also the editor of Visions, A Study of False Sight (Pseudopia). By 

Edward Hammond Clarke. A Memorial Sketch of the author, by Doctor 

Holmes, gives additional value to this book. 

Medical Essays. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1883. 
Pages from an Old Volume of Life. Boston : Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co. 1883. 



336 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



A Mortal Antipathy. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co 
1885. 

One Hundred Days in Europe. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & 
Co. 1887. 

Before the Curfew and Other Poems. Boston: Houghton 
Mifflin & Co. 1888. 

Over the Teacups. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1890. 







































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